


Everybody Lives aka the Story of River Song

by jesterlady



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Alternate Timelines, Backstory, Big Bang Challenge, Canon Backstory, Canon Het Relationship, Crossing Timelines, Episode: s04e08 Silence in the Library, Episode: s04e09 Forest of the Dead, Episode: s05e04 The Time of Angels, Episode: s05e05 Flesh and Stone, Episode: s05e12 The Pandorica Opens, Episode: s05e13 The Big Bang, Episode: s06e01 The Impossible Astronaut, Episode: s06e02 Day of the Moon, Episode: s06e07 A Good Man Goes to War, Episode: s06e08 Let's Kill Hitler, F/M, Gen, Humor, Multi, Science Fiction, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-23
Updated: 2012-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-05 20:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/410857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jesterlady/pseuds/jesterlady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River Song's life from beginning to end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> Banner by slowsunrise on LJ  
> Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who. I've used quite a bit of dialogue from the show and that's where the title is from.  
> A/N: So, River's not exactly my favorite character and I've always felt her arc doesn't make sense, not even in a timey-wimey way, so I resolved to write her story from her POV, changing a few details so that it's actually possible for her to even exist.
> 
>  
> 
> [](http://s23.photobucket.com/albums/b392/elentarifimbrethil/Banners/?action=view&current=RSBBBanner.jpg)  
> 

People don’t remember the time of their birth or their first few years of life. Oh, but I’m unusual. Like you wouldn’t believe. But I’ll tell you about it anyway because this is a story like no other. That I can promise.

My name is River Song. That’s not always been my name, but it’s the one I like best, the one that I first heard him call me by.

Who is he? Spoilers, sweetie.

I was born in the fifty-first century to a twenty-first century woman on a space station in the middle of an army and a war was waged for my allegiance. Talk about spoiling a girl.

I’ve had to piece together the fragments of the story from different people, my parents, enemies, innocent bystanders, and always him. But I can remember it. I can remember flashes of red hair, desperate words of encouragement, an eye patch, and then nothing but black. I was taken from my mother, never allowed to see my father, and given to the enemy. 

But a spectacular battle was fought that day for me. My parents had come for me even if I wasn’t there anymore. The battle of Demon’s Run lives on in the memories of more than a few civilizations. And I would know. The armies of the Silence were driven back in retreat and people died. People died for me because I wasn’t there. Not that I didn’t make up for it later. Better fashionably late than never, I suppose.

The early years are a bit of a blur, I admit. I don’t know whether to be thankful for that or not. But I try not to think about it, and, really, who has the time? But I do remember training, learning, growing, experimenting, stretching, revision, and a great deal of pain. 

Upon further reflection I’ve concluded that the memory loss was a result of a combination of brainwashing, memory erasure/being with the Silence, and my own natural time immunities.

Because I’m no ordinary human, me. Oh no, I’m the child of the Tardis. And that’s the most wonderful heritage anyone can have. I’m fully human and I can’t change my cells anymore (wait for that bit!) but I understand time a lot better than most linear beings can. It’s an innate knowledge built on the fiery courage and patient wisdom of my parents that mixed with the power of the time vortex in the heart of the Tardis. A bit of a cautionary tale for newlyweds, you might say.

The Tardis is a time machine, but not just a machine, she’s so very alive, so very much a…mother. I can hear her inside my head, not as much as he can, of course, but nearly all the time. She taught me how to fly her in what felt like seconds even though I know she prefers his rocky piloting to my smooth skill. Silly girl, my mother Tardis, but the very best place to be in the universe. Because of her I can run across all of time and space, with him or by myself, and I know she shields my mind from the things I shouldn’t know. Like those first few years of my life.

I do remember Florida in the sixties. You’d think any little girl would be pleased as anything to be there. Sandy beaches, communism threats, all the usual treats. But I spent most of my time in an old run-down orphanage with the most spectacularly spooky staircase even if I couldn’t fully appreciate that at the time. I was taken care of by a very broken-minded old man and I often wished I could send him away and make him better, yet, I never wanted him to leave me alone with them. Even if I couldn’t remember who _they_ were most of the time. But I did know that suit. That space suit they kept testing and improving and making me get into. It was a veritable horror and nothing like play-acting. I would get flashes of _him_ in my head, of faces I was sure I’d never seen, but I still didn’t know who I was.

I doubt anyone will ever really know. One of a kind, River Song.

Did I mention I was born Melody Pond? (So sorry, dear Father, but I could never be a Williams like you, I don’t deserve it.) That’s what they called me back then. Back in the Florida days with the spacesuit. What Mr. Renfrew called me when he could remember who I was, when he wasn’t painting the walls with red paint and…other things. It was he who first got me to think of getting help. Once they’d moved me to the warehouse I had more opportunity. I was left alone more often. And I had access to a communications system. 

My fear and youth combined to the only sensible solution any young American child would need and I called the President. I didn’t know how I always reached him, but I only could when I was wearing that awful suit. But the idiotic man seemed to think I was a boy and I was much too young and scared at the time to give any kind of coherent response or message. So I was stuffed in the suit and given the order to kill. I didn't want to. I kept calling for help, wanting anyone, anyone to save me from the spaceman. Those were my first glimpses of _him_. Seen in shadow, behind a mask of fear, but it would forever color my existence. Yet I was supposed to kill him.

Rather hard to do with your mother pointing a gun at you. My, but it is exciting being a time traveler. I recognized her from the old picture I had in my room, the one thing they’d given me or let me keep, I’m not sure. And that’s why I was startled into not shooting, I think. Instead, I ran. I ran as far as I could. They found me anyway, they’re everywhere, the forgetful annoyances that they are and they forced me back, back to confront my mother once again. At that point, though, she was scared and afraid, I was even more so, and all I could think was that my mother had finally come to take me away. 

“Please help me. Help me. Please.”

But my mother couldn’t remember and she couldn’t stop the Silence. They took her and I ran again. But I had the good sense to run without the suit. To fight and claw my way out of it. It hurt more than you could ever imagine, but I did it anyway. I hadn’t realized that strength and skill was part of who I was. That they’d made me different than other humans. I’d always been different on the inside and now I was on the outside as well. Pretty heavy thoughts for a small child and I didn’t take the time to analyze them. I just wanted to get away. I ran for so long, for months. I remember thinking hazily that maybe I could find my mother.

I died instead.

***

What’s dying like? Well, it’s all very relative, isn’t it? I can’t tell you how you’ll die and no one but he will ever die like I died. It’s a little bit like being covered in molten lava, (trust me on that) it’s a little bit like taking a shower, a little bit like having a fever, a little bit like having a seizure, a little bit like a nature show, a little bit like making love, a little bit like everything. And it hurts. It’s fire and ice and it’s wonderful in a way, like getting a new haircut that’s really first rate or buying a new dress that you can’t wait to wear. I couldn’t control it that first time, I don’t think anyone can entirely (though some used to be much better at it, I’ve read); but I know I can at least a little better than he can, (he’s rubbish at regenerating). The oddest part is that it isn’t over when you’ve changed.

I hadn’t really known what was going to happen actually. I know I told that man not to worry, but I was just repeating rote told to me by…a woman. Someone I didn’t like but knew very well. Yet it was something that I could feel inside. Deep down I knew that dying wasn’t the end. And it most certainly was not. It was only the beginning. The first cycle of the rest of my crazy life.

Still, I was a little disoriented at first. Understandably, I think. I was even younger than I had been before and I was left in an alley in the middle of New York with a man of disreputable fashion sense though I doubt that was his fault, poor thing. He didn’t know what to do with a crying child who had just disintegrated into golden light so he ran in the other direction. I was too busy trying to figure out how I had a ten year old’s knowledge and what to do with that in a three year old’s body which was brand new. So I sat down by his fire, trying to examine my new self as best I could without a mirror, and I waited.

They found me rather quickly actually. I was a little bit surprised but by then I was too tired and little to do much about it. I did find out that you do not mess with a girl in the middle of her regeneration cycle. I’d like to see anyone else knock out an entire line of Silence with their regenerative powers. Not that I remembered it afterwards. More’s the pity. But there were some of the Silence’s allies or servants that got the same treatment and I remembered their flattened out bodies with eye patches for a good long while.

There was that woman again, but I couldn’t remember that afterward. I just remembered a gravelly voice talking to me.

“You didn’t think you could run forever, little Melody? We knew where you were the instant you started to regenerate. And now the time has come to place our girl for her task. Always remember that, Melody. You were born to kill the Doctor.”

After that I remember white, sterile walls, a long metal table, a device that had long, circular tubes coming out of it, and a large screen of some kind. Thinking about it gives me a headache so I don’t, thank you. I’m sure we can all well imagine the kinds of things that happened at that point. We’ll skip along to the voyage I next took. To a little town in England.

I don’t know what planet I was on then or what century. I do remember getting very tired of tests. I remember closing my eyes and trying very hard to wish myself away. I didn’t mind killing their precious Doctor, but did it have to take all this to do it? I didn’t think so. So I did escape. I knocked out some guards, grabbed a gun (I was only seven!) and a wrist device I’d seen some people operate. And then I wasn’t there anymore. I was somewhere else. Somewhere like Earth. Then it was all down to good, old fashioned detective work. I found out what year and what planet and then spent a week learning how to properly use my wrist device and set out to find the two people I knew who could lead me to the Doctor.

It took me years which was rather a benefit for I looked the proper age by the time I got to them. It was beyond just needing to get to the Doctor, some part of me needed to see them, wanted to see them. Wanted to feel somewhat normal, to know what it would be like to grow up under them. Okay, and I got the timing just a bit off. I’ll learn, don’t you worry about that.

It was the twentieth century and I got myself placed in Leadworth. Lower Leadworth to be precise. I had a home and parents. Two sets actually because my real parents were children who lived in the same town and were in my class at school. Complicated I told you, oh yes. But I had parents who brought me up and acted as my guardians. They were fake, (robots actually) but they didn’t realize that. That made it easier for the population to accept. Clyve and Rita Thompkins and their wayward daughter Melody, Mels if you like. We’d moved from South London for my health, you see. We were hoping to have a quiet life, a normal life. One where I could get out and mix with the local kids and possibly play sports of some kind.

It was hard to be the only one in my family with any idea of why we were really there. For me to play spy. For me to get close to my adolescent parents. For me to kill the Doctor. At the time I didn’t have a problem with that and I hadn’t since the alley. It was all so very simple. It was what I had been born to do and I could do it better than anyone alive. All I had to do was wait because he would be coming back for my parents. But it was still hard.

Clyve and Rita, (it would be too confusing to call them my parents, don’t you agree?) had encouraged me to go out and mingle, as it were, before school started in a few weeks. (A little ironic when I’m the one who programmed them to in the first place.) So I had gone outside. I was older now from my long search and I was even older than that in my head. Never try to overshadow me in the strange department; I’m afraid you won’t win.

Leadworth was…boring. Utterly and completely stagnant. I hated it. The only place I hated more was that orphanage. I had so much hope the Doctor would come and then I could be free of that completely useless town. Once he was dead then I would go off and explore the universe. Then I met Amelia Pond and Rory Williams.

It was a bit odd meeting them for the first time, but I rather enjoyed myself. I was walking, just along the road, looking for something to do. I really was fooling myself. There was nothing until I heard a shout from up ahead and I grinned. There was a garden with a hedge around it and I peeked over the top. A ginger girl was dressed up in a nightdress and carrying a suitcase and using it to bang the knees of a small, light-haired boy.

“You’re on fire!” she cried. “I’ll save you, Doctor.”

“I don’t want to be on fire,” the boy cried, obviously feeling the bruises. “The Doctor doesn’t get caught on fire. He’s too clever for that, you told me so.”

“You don’t know anything,” the girl said with a rather self-important tone to her voice. “I know the Doctor and maybe you will if you’re lucky enough to be around when he comes back for me.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” the boy cried, just as fiercely, and stuck out his tongue at her.

“Then be on fire, stupid,” the girl said.

“It’s not nice to call people names,” the boy said. “The Doctor wouldn’t.”

I could quickly see what his defense against her was. Whatever he didn’t like he could probably bet the Doctor wouldn’t either and if she could see it too, then he might just win. A really brilliant strategy if you thought about it. But I’d always known there had to be something amazing about each of my parents.

Reluctantly, my mother, (oh, surely you realized that by now), nodded.

“The Doctor is good though he doesn’t mind saying just what he thinks. Fine, Rory, but the Doctor saved me from Prisoner Zero and now I’m saving him from being burnt up. That’s the game.”

I decided to step in.

“Wouldn’t you rather have a proper villain?”

They both turned and stared at me.

“Who are you?” Rory asked cautiously.

“Why are you in my garden?” she asked a bit more brusquely.

“I was just happening by, but I think you need a third to play act this particular game,” I said. “Name’s Mels. Just moved in.”

“I’m Rory,” the boy said, sticking out his hand, “and this is Amelia.”

“Well met, you two,” I said, grinning, shaking his hand more heartily than strictly necessary. “Now…tell me about the Doctor.”

“You wouldn’t want to know,” Amelia said a bit frostily. “Only Rory doesn’t think I’m crazy.”

“I think you’ll find I’m quite crazy myself,” I told her. “And I love Doctors.”

Amelia regarded me for a moment or two, then finally smiled.

“You can be Prisoner Zero. Rory’s the Doctor, and I’ll be myself. You’ll know all about it soon enough.”

“Maybe one day you will too,” I murmured and stepped into the garden. “A villain, oh, I hope that means something.”

***

And that’s how it started. When we weren’t playing Raggedy Doctor we were playing Pandora’s Box or encouraging Amy’s rather interesting fascination with Ancient Rome. We very quickly established ourselves as the three odd idiots in the relatively boring town and that was just fine with me. Poor Amelia went to psychiatrist after psychiatrist; often blamed as the source of my own acting out since everything for me was colored by the wild stories of the Doctor, because I knew every word was true. But I think Amelia would rather have been blamed than for me to have been. While she often scolded me heartily in private, she stood up fiercely for me in public, (isn’t she the proper little mother?), and bit quite a lot of people on my behalf. And Rory’s. Without question she led us around by our noses. Not that I ever listened to her really. What kind of a rebel daughter would I be if I did?

Poor Rory was hounded by these two strong-willed little girls and while I believed he regarded me fondly, (very stern and over-protective if I think about it), I knew that it was Amelia he would always live and die for, (even at the tender age of twelve), and that’s just what a girl looks for in a father, don’t you agree?

As for me, well, nobody messes with my parents and gets away with it. Jeff Angelo found that out the first day of my first term at school. Always a little dim, poor Jeff.

Having spent the past few weeks playing ‘the Doctor’ with Amelia and Rory I’d grown rather fond of them and their misplaced faith in the Raggedy Doctor. Yes, I believed he was amazing and brilliant and had saved Amelia, but I also knew that his fervor could burn the whole universe and that had to be stopped. By yours truly.

Still, being rather happy for perhaps the first time in my life, I had no qualms whatsoever in putting down an idiot when I saw one.

It was our first free period and Amelia had brought her little models to school to play with. Rory had ‘borrowed’ another of his father’s ties. It was the first time that the children of the village at large had seen a re-enactment of the famous Doctor. Most of them laughed, a couple scoffed, and Jeff Angelo, (no doubt through some inability to express how much he wanted to be friends), decided to deride Amelia for her fantasy.

“You’re dafter than old lady Poggit!” Jeff shouted boldly, swaggering to the front of the group. “My mum says you’re bound for the loony bin cause your aunt doesn’t want to have to put up with your crazy notions anymore.”

Amelia practically bared her teeth and I saw Rory tense up, like he wanted nothing more than to punch Jeff, but wasn’t sure how. (Oh, Father dear, that you will learn, I promise.) 

“Oi, you got a problem?” I asked, sauntering behind Jeff and slinging my arm over his shoulders. “Sounds like your little brain doesn’t know how to comprehend the wonders of the universe. Poor baby. Bet your parents are disappointed. Maybe they want to send you away. Maybe you’ll have to live on the streets. And without even an imagination to keep you happy. What a sad life you’ll have.”

Jeff gaped at me, as did most of the children, including Rory. Amelia narrowed her eyes, but said nothing.

“Y-you’re one to talk,” Jeff finally stuttered. “Nobody even knows who you are.”

“Nobody needs to,” I said and moved away, not really caring what he might have to say next.

I heard a noise from behind me and reacted purely on instinct, (the best in three galaxies, maybe more). I bent, grabbed behind me to seize Jeff’s arm, twisted, and used his weight to throw him to the ground. I put my fashionably-attired foot on his chest.

“How-how?” he asked, looking so scared he just might cry.

“You’ll never know, dear,” I said, “but I bet the Doctor would have.”

I moved away, gathering Amelia and Rory in my wake. Amelia bent over Jeff and I heard a little shriek coming from him, then Amelia wiped her mouth distastefully and walked off, dragging Rory who was gaping.

“I think you’re in charge of security,” she informed me.

I laughed and turned a cartwheel. 

***

It was like that all the time. Crazy Mels with her inability to follow the rules. Mad Amelia and her delusions and propensity for biting people. Loyal Rory always tagging along faithfully and giving us just the edge of respectability we needed.

I killed off my mother Rita when I was fourteen. Not maliciously, I promise you. But though it was surprisingly easy to program and fix robots from the fifty-first century because I was me, it was still rather hard to get the proper parts when my time travelling device had died. So I staged a tragedy for myself. And, really, it just gave me the excuse to act out even more.

The townspeople all nodded knowingly and clucked their tongues at my antics. Rory and Amelia stuck by my side like two limpets, refusing to let me go anywhere alone. Silly little dears. 

There was one thing I refused to do and that was to pretend that the Doctor wasn’t real. As Amelia grew up she started to avoid mentioning him and the dolls and play-acting were put aside, but the Doctor was my life, even then, and I used every opportunity I had to mention him. Besides, hearing about him from Amelia’s perspective was a bit like re-indoctrination. Her picture of the Raggedy Doctor was so vivid, so passionate, so real, that it made me wish it could be so. I wanted the Raggedy Doctor to be real, to not be the Oncoming Storm that I knew he was. I wanted to travel the stars in that blue box of his, laughing at the universe. Since the only perfect male I knew happened to be my father, I wasn’t inclined to think about boys…too much. (A girl’s got to have some fun, after all!) I always knew the only man I could ever marry would be the Doctor.

And then I would kill him. Just the way it had to be.

So the day that Amelia died and Amy rose from her ashes was a very sad one for me. The last psychiatrist had just been bitten. We were about sixteen and Rory had been bullied into dancing lessons for the school dance coming up. Amy never said why she stopped believing, but isn’t it obvious? The wear and tear of time, the leaving and never looking back, (that’s the real Doctor, I thought to myself), and her dreams had died. They’d been starved and even girls like Amelia Pond can’t stay little forever. They can’t wait forever.

Boys like Rory can wait forever and they do, indeed, they do for the right thing. But not my mother. No, the stars hadn’t come for her, so she turned her back on them. She coolly demanded we call her Amy from now on, decided she didn’t want to talk about the Doctor anymore, (not that that ever stopped me), and made fun of Rory’s latest haircut.

It was just one more reason to kill the Doctor.

Therefore, my next mission was to get the two of them together already because, honestly, it still remains a wonder I was even born. Rory refused to take chances and Amy was completely oblivious. There was much gradual pushing, especially on Rory’s end.

“Just tell her already.”

“No, no, no. She-she doesn’t, she won’t…”

“Stop stammering, be a man, and let it rip out of you. You’re meant to be.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’ve been to the future,” I said wisely.

“Don’t tell that to Amy,” he said suddenly, rather fiercely. “She’s getting over it. Whatever happened back…then. Don’t-don’t drag her back into it.”

“My word on it, soldier,” I said, saluting him mockingly. “But you have to make a move.”

He didn’t. Not until I forced it to come out.

One night I stole a bus and got bailed out by my parents, (really, the proper way).

“Seriously, it’s got to be you two. Oh, cut to the song already, it’s getting boring.”

Of course Rory froze in place and Amy looked absolutely confused and tried to explain it away by listing all the reasons why she’d never gone after him.

“He’s gay.”

“A friend.”

Oh, the looks on their faces. Especially Rory’s.

“I’m not gay.”

Trust my mother to try and bring an unwilling victim out of the closet.

“In the entire time I’ve known you when have you ever shown the slightest interest in a girl?”

“Penny in the air,” I whispered.

“I've known you for what, ten years? I've seen you practically every day. Name one girl you've paid the slightest bit of attention to.”

My dear father was not quite the man of legend he will be and he ran and my dear mother finally understood what everyone in the entire town of Leadworth, Upper and Lower, had known for years and ran after him.

“Penny drops.”

Though it was all a bit same-y after that. Us three hanging out became a bit awkward when it was Rory staying over instead of me and who really wants to watch their parents make out anyway?

So I turned to the wide world of crime to keep me busy, all the while keeping an ear to the ground because the time had to be close for the Doctor to come back.

Just my luck that I was in Brazil the day it happened.

***

When I got back from a little bit of a crazy drug syndicate bust-up, (such stories as will never be told, I’m afraid), I found out that the Doctor had come back and had saved the Earth with the help of Jeff Angelo of all people. Just because the boy had improved a bit didn’t give him license to help save the world. At least in my opinion. I might have pouted for a few weeks.

Amy said she was the same, yet Rory and I saw that it had changed her. Her protestations of the Doctor not being real had vanished and she was quieter. It had obviously hurt her that he’d left her behind again. I told her that if she ever saw him again she had to come and get me at once because I wanted to give him a piece of my mind. And snuff out his life. The little things.

Rory was happier only in that Amy now depended on him for a lot more and no longer tried to avoid their relationship. It was just a year later that he proposed, (after much prodding from yours truly), and she accepted. She asked me to stand up for her, I laughed and told her there was only one wedding I would ever go to, my own, and that depended highly on the groom. I did throw her the most amazing stagette party and Rory has never ceased to scold me for it.

So I went away for the whole week of their wedding and the week after. And the blasted man came to their wedding! I was definitely losing my touch. On the other hand, I did have an amazing rendezvous in an amazing little Swiss chalet. One can’t have everything, I suppose.

My parents were away for a few weeks on their honeymoon, though when they got back they informed me they’d been on several honeymoons. And that they’d been gone for more than a year, (Earth time), before that. I was a bit livid and they were a bit apologetic and there were a few hugs all around but I’ve still never quite forgiven them for it. 

All their stories about the Doctor were new and fresh and I drank them up like water in the desert. Vampires in Venice, Silurians beneath the Earth, a planet on a honeymoon, something about a Pandorica, flying fish and dream crystals, star whales and Vincent Van Gogh, singing planets and Weeping Angels with some woman who might be the Doctor’s wife. I was green with envy on both accounts. Oh, that man, that impossible man. I so needed to meet him. 

They decided to go on a trip to America about two months after they were married and a sickeningly perfect pair of newlyweds they made too, except that Amy was looking a little bit peaked before they went and I jokingly said she must be pregnant. (Well, how was I to know?) They didn’t tell me why, except that they wanted a normal honeymoon.

I thought about following them, (they were annoyingly mum about whether the Doctor was going to come back and I had my suspicions), but ended up getting caught while stealing a rather fetching necklace from a jewelry store and, thus, was not able to catch up. By the time I’d found out where they went they were mysteriously back in Leadworth and absolutely, completely different people.

I went to their house the minute I heard that they were back. It was like walking into a scene from a nightmare. Amy was dressed all in white, some sort of hospital clothing. Rory had apparently taken our childhood much too much to heart and was dressing like a centurion again. They didn’t want to see me, they didn’t want to talk. I left them alone to their private grief, but I was back again the next day.

Oh, my poor mother. She was so broken and my father…well, he was haunted and quiet. So like the soldier he’d half-handedly mentioned he’d been for two thousand years. Like it wasn’t him it had happened to. But I could see the difference in his eyes. He was older than I was now, so much older. And he’d lost something. I wouldn’t know till later what it was when a choked up Rory informed me privately that Amy had lost a baby. He made it sound like a still birth, but I was already the proof it wasn’t and I felt just a little bit more reconciled to my parents, seeing how much they had actually wanted me. But I had to watch Amy, so very pale, get harder and quieter, and she wouldn’t tell me what had happened. Just that they had to find the Doctor again.

It was a whole summer before they did and they made their desperate plan meanwhile; I may have added a helpful idea or two without really knowing what they were planning. But then again, it was only fair, because they didn’t know what I was planning. And they wouldn’t have been happy had they found out. But that couldn’t be helped. It was what I was born to do and do it I had to.

I had the feeling I wouldn’t be back so I offed my robot dad. Another tragedy for Mels to act out over. The people all around gathered in sympathy and it was the only thing that got Amy and Rory to take a break from their Doctor-finding plans. That's the kind of people my folks are. They may be in the worst kind of pain imaginable, but if something happens to someone they love, they step up to the plate.

Then it happened, the day I met the Doctor and got him right where I wanted him: on his back.

***

“You said he was funny, you never said he was hot.”

Oh, the Doctor. He was absolutely everything I’d ever dreamed and studied about and so much more. It would be an absolute shame to kill him. Still, the sirens were ringing and I had just stolen a rather amazing vehicle. Too bad the Doctor’s such a clever liar. Because I didn’t have time to notice the slight tugging of recognition as I stepped into the blue box I’d been hearing about all my life. No, I just shot and created a beautiful chaos, crashed into Third Reich, and got shot by Hitler.

It hurt. A lot. And my father couldn’t save me, even though I could feel him trying. Not that I really minded dying. Dying creates sympathy and now that I had the Doctor, I didn’t need to keep up the pretenses. I could finally let my parents know who I was.

“I used to dream about you. All those stories Amy told me.”

“What stories? Tell me what stories. Vampires in Venice, that's a belter.”

“When I was little, I was going to marry you.”

I could never marry anyone else, I still thought so.

“Good idea, let's get married. You live and I'll marry you, deal? Deal?”

Oh, that daft man!

“Shouldn't you ask my parents’ permission?” 

“Soon as you're well, I'll get on the phone.”

“Might as well do it now, since they're both right here.” I had to laugh inside through the pain at their glances. I could see the moment of recognition in the Doctor’s eyes, when he figured out what was happening. “Penny in the air. Penny drops!”

“What the hell's going on?”

Soon, Father dear, soon.

“Back! Back! Back! Get back!”

With effort I stood up. It looks better when you’re standing up.

“Last time I did this I ended up a toddler in the middle of New York.”

“Okay, Doctor, explain what is happening? Please!”

Oh, Mother, always with the questions.

“Mels. Short for..?”

“Melody,” I supplied helpfully.

“Yeah, I named my daughter after her.”

“You named your daughter... after your daughter.”

Which, honestly, I hadn’t planned. I hadn’t even known to. Seems like some things just work out on their own. 

But everything was going to change from that point and I had no idea who I would become. I wouldn’t really be their daughter anymore. Naturally or adopted. Not in the same way. If anything was to be said, it would have to be now.

“Took me years to find you two. I'm so glad I did. And, you see, it all worked out in the end, didn't it? You got to raise me after all.”

“You're Melody?”

“But if she's Melody, that means she's also...” 

I had no idea what Rory was blathering about, but I couldn’t hold it any longer.

“Oh, shut up, Dad! I'm focusing on a dress size.”

Cut to the glorious, golden explosion that would become me as I am now.

First thing’s first, I loved my new hair. Oh, it was amazing. And the curves. Well, I should be having a lot of fun there.

“The teeth!” I looked into the mirror. “The teeth, the teeth! Oh, look at them!” How convenient he was standing just like that. Oh, my Doctor. “Watch out! That bow tie! Excuse me, you lot, I need to weigh myself!”

I heard them gibbering in the background, but I was doing a lot of self-discovery. And applying poison lips, that sort of thing. Luckily I always kept a supply on hand.

“That's River Song.”

“Who's River Song?”

They all looked at me like I had two heads. Honestly, it was just a little question.

“Spoilers.”

I didn’t really have the time to find out what spoilers were. I was regenerating like crazy and everything was so brand new. Last time I hadn’t really had the time to process before I was bundled up into a lab. This time I was so much older and I could more easily integrate the before with the after.

But I can’t tell you how disorienting being in a new body is. It’s like being born with the sensibility to recognize it and the memory of a whole other life to boot. And this time I was right on target for my mission. Truth be told it was more my focus than my new body or personality.

“Well, now, enough of all that!” Time to kill. “Down to business.”

“Oh, hello. I thought we were getting married.”

Oh, if only I had the time…

“I told you, I'm not a wedding person.”

Which began a slight little dance that I didn’t mind losing at all. Ooh, he was good. Absolutely perfect. I could have just eaten him up.

“Goodness, is killing you going to take all day?”

“Why? Are you busy?”

“Oh, I'm not complaining.”

The letter opener was tossed aside.

“If you were in a hurry, you could've killed me in the cornfield.”

“We'd only just met. I'm a psychopath, I'm not rude.”

“You are not a psychopath! Why would she be a psychopath?”

Strange how I felt so differently toward Amy after regenerating. The protectiveness was all gone. A little bit of the abandonment was back.

“Oh, Mummy, Mummy, pay attention. I was trained and conditioned for one purpose. I was born to kill the Doctor.”

“Demon’s Run, remember? This is what they were building, my bespoke psychopath.”

“I’m all yours, sweetie.”

And the deed was done. Oh, it was perfect, it was cruel, and it was finally over. A bit of a letdown really, but then I’d never been one to let boredom get me down. I had a whole city to explore and once I was finished running amuck I had no doubt I could somehow figure out how to get the attention of someone to get me out of there. Maybe I would kidnap my parents in the Tardis. It couldn’t be that difficult to fly. 

It didn’t end up that way, however. I was caught by technology I didn’t understand and saved by my parents. By him. And I watched him, watched him be mad and brilliant and impossible and I began to see exactly what Amy had seen all those years ago. How he seemed to know me. Seemed to understand me when I didn’t even understand myself. I couldn’t save him, but he made me feel a little bit more kindly disposed to my parents.

“You-you’re the child of the Tardis,” he gasped out. “You can fly her. You can save them.”

So I stepped into the Tardis and this time I felt it. I felt like I was home. I felt more surrounded by love than I’d ever felt. All that I’d ever wondered about suddenly made sense and I just knew how to fly her. I knew how she worked, I knew how to save them, and I knew I’d never forget it. I think the Tardis changed something in me, or, maybe, something in me that had been missing was finally back in place.

Amy and Rory looked at me in amazement when we materialized around them.

“I seem to be able to fly her. She showed me how…she taught me. The Doctor says I'm the child of the Tardis. What does he mean?”

“Where is he?” was all Amy could say.

And they knelt by their dying friend and then motioned for me to do the same.

"Find her. Find River Song and tell her something from me.”

“Tell her what?”

He whispered it in my ear.

“Tell her I will never give up on her.”

“Well, I'm sure she knows,” I said, and for a desperate moment I wished I was River Song, though not once she found out the Doctor had died.

“Who's River Song?”

Amy showed me. My mother showed me my new form. I was to be River Song. And the idea seemed impossible to me. How could the Doctor have such faith in me? I knew time could be re-written, I felt it. But he seemed so sure.

I would give anything to be that sure. So I decided to change the world.

“Just tell me. The Doctor…is he worth it?”

It wasn’t just Melody Pond asking, not just Mels Thompkins, not just the future River Song. Everything inside me that I had ever been or ever would be wanted to know. Needed to know. Needed to have the faith that little Amelia Pond had found so easy.

“Yes. Yes, he is.”

I put my hands to his face, summoning all of my regenerative energy.

“River? No! What are you doing?”

I smiled.

“Hello, sweetie.”

The power flooded out of me and into him as I kissed him and I would never have it any other way. After all, it was a hell of a real first kiss.

The next thing I knew my parents were leaning over me, and, amazingly enough, they looked like they loved me. I didn’t know why, but I was so glad. With all that had happened and with my regenerative energy gone I could remember their grief more clearly and I knew how hard they had tried to find me.

Amy told me that I couldn’t regenerate anymore. I would be this way forever. Thank goodness it was a good one then, don’t you agree?

“He said no one could save him but he must have known I could.”

“Rule one.” I heard his voice. “The Doctor lies.”

I could barely hear anything after that, just somehow him saying.

“She will be... amazing.”

I hoped he was right.


	2. Part Two

The Sisters of the Infinite Schism may be the best doctors in the universe, but they were rubbish at transportation. I was stuck somewhere in the fifty-second century in a galaxy I didn’t even know the name of. But I was, or was to be, River Song, and I had the Tardis in my head.

I had been a bit disappointed to wake up and find the Doctor and my parents gone. But I’d been left a gift. A blue, blank book and I immediately decided that it would never have anything written in it unless it had to do with the Doctor. Because I had to find him. We were to be married, after all.

With the Doctor as a time traveler he left big footprints across all times and civilizations. What better way to find him than track those instances? What better way to track them than through archeology? After all, love a tomb.

I went by the name River Song; I’d learned how dangerous it was to be Melody Pond. And there I had a brand new face to hide behind. Through a few instances of bribery/flattery/a wonderful memory involving recently acquired hallucinogenic lipstick, I found my way to the year 5123 and entered the Luna University.

It was exactly what I was born to do, (other than that homicide business, of course), and I’d almost never been happier. I studied so many things. They even had a Rudimentary Old High Gallifreyan course which I quickly discovered was absolute rubbish and I already knew the language instinctively. Bless my mother Tardis. I couldn’t wait to meet the Doctor again and tell him something in his own language and watch his eyes pop out.

In the meantime, I studied hard, didn’t kill anyone, and barely had any fun at all. It was all overshadowed by the knowledge that I was changing and the Doctor would be pleased. I did meet a very nice Auton bloke and we exchanged…pleasantries while he occasionally exchanged heads.

But I mostly studied and I learned so many things about the Doctor. That man who had been so many men. He’d strode across the universe, capturing hearts and minds and changing lives and I could very much see why some people would want him dead. He was too brave, too powerful, too brilliant, too high, too wonderful, too terrible to be allowed to live. I’d been taught that all my life. But I could see in between those things at that point. I’d met him for myself. I’d been given his trust and his mercy and I vowed never to let him regret it.

The day I graduated was one of the worst of my life. I’d done the whole celebratory thing and gone out with my mates and then I’d gone back to my study, Dr. River Song, to work some more. Lately I’d been reading all sorts of horrible things concerning the Doctor’s death and I needed to know why. I needed to know how. I needed to know that it wasn’t me. Because in reading about him, remembering my own encounter as well as all of the stories my parents told me, I had learned to love that man more than I’d ever dreamed possible. There was no one more wonderful in the whole of the universe and there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done for him.

And I’d only truly met him the once.

But then they came for me. The woman with the eye patch and the creatures of my past. I remembered all in a rush, everything that had ever happened and my mind was as much overwhelmed by the memories as the drugs they pumped into me.

"You never really escaped us, Melody Pond. We were always coming for you. I made you what you are. The woman who kills the Doctor."

I woke up in the suit. In the Apollo 11 spacesuit of my childhood. This time there was no autonomy. There was no ripping my way out. I was deep underwater and it seemed like I could almost hear a horrible lullaby from my research lilting endlessly in my head.

And there he was, my Doctor, who had died the last time we met, and now seemed likely to die this time as well. Both times by my hands. It broke my heart. I desperately begged him to run, to go, to flee, but he wouldn’t, that stubborn, impossible man.

“I can't stop it. The suit's in control.”

“You're not supposed to. This has to happen.” 

“Run!”

“I did run. Running brought me here.”

“I tried to fight it, but I can't, it's too strong.”

“I know. It's okay. This is where I die. This is a fixed point, this must happen, this always happens. Don't worry...you won't even remember this. Look over there.”

I saw myself, I saw my parents, and I saw the intricacies of time.

“That's me. How can I be there?”

“That's you from the future. Serving time for a murder you probably can't remember. My murder.”

It seemed the cruelest thing that I would ever, ever know.

“Why would you do that? Make me watch?”

“So that you know this is inevitable. And you are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven.”

I couldn’t comprehend this man. I, who had studied and loved him from afar for so long, was utterly unable to understand how he could be so compassionate and so cruelly resolute at the same time.

“Please, my love. Please, please just run!” 

“I can't.”

“Time can be rewritten.”

“Don't you dare.” He had the strangest look of satisfaction on his face. As if he was paying me back for something. It was the least of my concerns at the moment, but I never forgot it. “Goodbye, River.”

And I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. It would kill me. So I did the only thing I could do and I stopped time.

I don’t think he was too happy with me.

Too bad for him.

The next thing I remember I was on a train, the world was entirely changed, and there was no more time. I had no idea where the Doctor was.

The Silence were everywhere and one day I found Madame Kovarian and we got…reacquainted.

She led me to Amy and Rory soon followed. A short chat with President Kennedy and Cleopatra and I had everything I needed. We captured the Silence and we remembered them. And one day a bug led us to the Holy Roman Emperor and his mad soothsayer.

My mother rescued him and he was so angry. He was so cross. Very unappreciative as well. I had to show him, I had to make him see. He was loved. He is loved. He is remembered. And he will never be forgotten. I would have left time the way it was and to hell with the universe, but he would never give up, I knew that. I knew eventually he’d find a way to touch me and it would all go back to the way it was. So first I had to make my point.

Not without a little harmless flirting, of course.

“There are so many theories about you and I, you know.”

“Idle gossip.” 

“Archaeology.”

“Same thing.”

“Am I the woman who marries you, or the woman who murders you?”

“Oh! I don't want to marry you.”

“I don't want to murder you.”

Not most of the time anyway. 

But I’d read enough of the past, (the future), to know that this should not be allowed to happen. But I was so very young then and I had only one option. Show him his worth.

Of course, those blasted Silence and Miss Baby Kidnapper had a few tricks up their own sleeves and we were a bit more rushed than I would have liked.

“What's this? Oh, it’s a timey-wimey distress beacon. Who built this?”

“I'm the child of the Tardis, I understand the physics.”

“Yes, but that's all you've got - a distress beacon!”

“I've been sending out a message, a distress call. Outside the bubble of our time, the universe is still turning, and I've sent a message everywhere, to the future and the past, the beginning and the end of everything. ‘The Doctor is dying, please, please help.’ ”

And the silly man still didn’t understand. He sees only the bad in himself.

“Those reports of the sun spots and the solar flares. They're wrong, there aren't any. It's not the sun, it's you; the sky is full of a million, million voices, saying ‘yes, of course, we'll help.’ You've touched so many lives, saved so many people. Did you think, when your time came, you'd really have to do more than just ask? You've decided that the universe is better off without you, but the universe doesn't agree.”

“River, no one can help me. A fixed point has been altered, time is disintegrating.”

“I can't let you die.”

“But I have to die-“

“Shut up! I can't let you die without knowing you are loved by so many, and so much. And by no one more than me.”

He almost shut up, almost. I could see I’d made my point on a universal scale. But he still didn’t understand what this was for me personally. How much he’d made me better.

“River, you and I, we know what this means. We are ground zero of an explosion that will engulf all reality. Billions on billions will suffer and die.”

“I'll suffer if I have to kill you.”

Was that selfish? Absolutely. Did I care? Not a jot.

“More than every living thing in the universe?”

“Yes.”

Maybe he understood then, but I could see it wouldn’t change anything. He would still die and I would still be left suffering. Though I wouldn’t remember it until later.

Instead he gave me a gift. Something he had in his power to give. 

“Now, River, I'm about to whisper something in your ear, and you have to remember it very, very carefully and tell no one what I said.” He leaned forward, careful not to touch me. “Look in my eye.” And there he was, the old liar. “I just told you my name. Now there you go, River Song. Melody Pond. You're the woman who married me. And, wife, I have a request. This world is dying, and it's my fault, and I can't bear it another day. Please, help me. There isn't another way.”

“Then you may kiss the bride.”

“I'll make it a good one.”

“You better.”

I’d seen the Doctor had faith in me, faith I didn’t deserve. But I’d never known he could also love me, just a little bit. A little bit of the way that I loved him. But he’d taken his bow tie and he’d joined our hands, my parents gave their consent, and we were married.

Not that it’s such a great honor to be married to the Doctor, I’m afraid I can think of at least three others he’s married throughout the universe. Almost a hobby of his, the idiot.

But he married me to honor me and to reassure me and to tell me everything was going to be all right. That blessed, moronic man.

If first kisses can ever be outshone by second kisses, well, this was the one. A time-sped-up-world-changing-completely-altering-my-life kiss and we were bound for all of my life.

I ended up back in the lake, having shot him, was taken back by the Silence, and then I couldn’t remember any of it. Which he also knew would happen. (Definitely saved him the honeymoon expenses.) But though I was left for the authorities to find and put into Stormcage, I had a curious sense of peace. I knew that whatever it was I had done, he would be okay. He would know and he would absolve me. And, somehow, it had all worked out all right.

I just hoped they had visitor’s days or something and that he would somehow find me. Because twelve thousand consecutive life sentences seemed a bit of a drag, to be honest.

***

Stormcage was all right. The guards were pretty, young, and gullible and I did have an entire cellblock to myself. The only thing I had when I went into that cell was my blue book and a degree that no one would honor anymore. But it was enough.

That night he came for me.

He materialized right into my cell and I grabbed my book and entered the most wonderful place in the universe.

“Are we going out?”

“Your parents are asleep. How's Stormcage?”

"I'm on the first night of twelve thousand consecutive life sentences…kind of early to say. Where are we going?"

"Calderon Bita!"

And I stood there, amazed, while he waxed glorious about the planet and the wonders we would see there. This was what I'd been living my life for.

“Did you bring the diary?”

“Oh, it's a diary?”

“It is now because, River, from now on, there are rules!”

“Ooh, you’ve gone all strict, not that I mind.”

“River, you and I, it's all in the wrong order. We’re never going to meet in sequence. You put everything in the diary so we know where we are.”

“Put what in the diary? Sweetie, I’m in the highest security prison in all of the known universe.”

“River Song could walk in and out of that prison like the walls weren't there.”

“I’m River Song.”

“Then you’ll be fine.”

My only complaint of the night was the strange feeling that he was entertaining more guests than one. But, otherwise, it was perfection. After all, I got a glimpse of the back of a future him exiting the Tardis. Oh, I liked that. The mind raced with possibilities.

I loved Calderon Bita. It was the most amazing sight I’d ever seen. And I knew, oh, I just knew that the wonders the Doctor would show me would never, ever end. I didn’t end up wearing the dress, (yet), because it was rather cold on that tree. But it was beautiful. 

It was not my fault that there was a tribe of aliens visiting who had certain prejudices against females in high heels. But I think the best moment of my life was when the Doctor grabbed my hand and we ran, laughing, all the way back to the Tardis. 

He showed me the Tardis and I was able to surprise him with how well I already understood it all. But there were wonders there I hadn’t even dreamed of. He showed me my own room and it had all my favorite things. The Tardis hummed in satisfaction in my head and I felt so at home.

He wasn’t surprised at all when I spoke to him in Old High Gallifreyan, the annoying, annoying man. Still, it was all rather good.

“That’s the way to show a girl a good time, my love,” I told him and he frowned at me as he set the controls to take us back to Stormcage.

It was at that point that I realized I could fly the Tardis better than him, having a direct link to the source, you could say, plus, I paid attention when she said things. But she didn’t seem to mind and a man’s pride appears to be rather universal.

“That’s a little bit personal,” he said primly and I laughed.

“Would you have me any other way?”

“I never said I would have you,” he said triumphantly.

“Too telling, Doctor dear,” I said, tossing my hair into his face. “I’m more like you than you think.”

“What a horrible thought,” he muttered, flipping switches. “Now, River, back to your cell you go. Be good, play nice with the other children, and don’t forget to write if you need anything.”

“How?”

Then he showed me the psychic paper and gave me the number for the Tardis console.

“Don’t be upset if I don’t get in contact for awhile,” I teased him. “I’m afraid I’m very bad at follow up after a date.”

“You bad girl, you,” he told me, smiling.

“Ta, sweetie,” I said and kissed him while he squirmed a lot. 

That’s my Doctor, the sexual understanding of a minnow.

To me that was our second kiss until much, much later when I forgave him for it not being as good as the first one.

And that’s the way it was. Sometimes he would just show up out of the blue, taking me to the Seas of the Seventh Star where the whales were ultraviolet. Or the time where the pygmies of a South African tribe tried to eat us alive in 1508. Or the one time he tried to sneak me out and actually got caught by the warden and spent three days locked up in the cell next to mine while the paperwork was sorted out.

There were other times when I needed to get out. Either because one of my old mates from school had fallen in with the Cult of the Third Shri’si and started to believe in the destruction of reality as the universe’s only cure for hedonism.

Or when I got an offer from an undercover agent to take his place in exposing a smuggling ring in the home world of the Atraxi in exchange for one life sentence knocked off. Aren’t they kind?

In some instances I was released legally, in others, well, I had a very good hallucinogenic lipstick supplier.

Other than occasionally pondering exactly what I had done to get put in there, I was rather happy at Stormcage.

After I had been in Stormcage about five years there was a time when I was running from the Sontarans. Honestly, they’re very cross and all I made was one little comment about a possible hen night. Since I was in the neighborhood I thought I’d stop back on Calderon Bita. And there it was…the bluest of blues.

“I knew you’d come back here, you nostalgic idiot. Hold me.”

My faint didn’t go quite as planned and there was obviously somebody else there. Just like that first night. Now it’s not like I didn’t know he travels with boys and girls and dogs and robots and everything in between, but…I’d just rather it was my parents, that’s all.

But after insulting my hair, all he did was send me back to Stormcage. Still, an adventure with the Doctor is an adventure with the Doctor whether it lasts for five minutes or five years. It got the Sontarans off my back anyway.

One day, the Doctor asked me to meet him at a bar in the Quibilu Nebula. I happily went, stowing away on a trader ship bound for that area.

“Hello, sweetie.”

“River Song, always late, hell on wheels,” he greeted me.

He looked a little sad.

“Are my parents with you?” I asked, looking around curiously. 

I hadn’t seen them in awhile and was feeling a little nostalgic.

“No, but I can give you their address if you want to write. Or even drop in,” he said, studiously avoiding my eyes.

“Doctor, did they leave you?”

“Oh, River, other way around. It was time.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know how much they meant to you.”

“Salt of the earth,” he agreed. “Not that I’ve ever understood that. What exactly does one want in salty earth and why is it considered a good thing? No crops, too much taste, and a general misconception that it’s snowed.”

I rolled my eyes and sat down next to him.

“Why am I here?”

“A bloke by the name of Jim the Fish is having a little trouble…” he said, pausing a second “…with his harem.”

I raised my eyebrow.

“Worthy fellow. What am I supposed to do about it?”

“Well, there’s a rather delicate balance on this planet,” he said. “The harem keep him happy, when he’s happy he works, when he works, the planet doesn’t get flooded.”

“You lost me way back,” I said, ordering a drink.

“No time for that,” he said, grabbing my hand and jerking me along.

We were involved in interplanetary politics for quite a while after that. Jim the Fish turned out to be a beaver type alien overlord keeping the world from total disaster by incessant dam building. He had a very sulky personality when he wasn’t being adored and girls from all over the planet were sent to cheer him up.

I disapproved.

While the Doctor worked on the weather control, I went undercover in the harem and soon turned the place upside down.

It was a bit hairy at first and Jim the Fish will never forget his first night with River Song. I wanted to beat his head in, but, after awhile, I rather loved Jim the Fish and after a little chat with me, some of his misogynistic views were altered slightly and life became a lot easier to bear for the women of his planet.

And when the Doctor discovered the cause of Jim the Fish’s perpetual unhappiness had more to do with a toothache than his libido, everyone won. 

We left Jim the Fish building his dam and I went back to my cell, the Doctor a little bit more receptive to a goodbye kiss. He must have really been missing my parents.

There are too many stories to tell. Too many wonderful adventures through time and space, the lifeblood of the galaxies running through our veins and mishaps averted left and right.

We were on Easter Island once. The appearance of a blue box out of nowhere had caused the natives to view the Doctor as a god. We had the best feast I’ve ever had in my life. If you’ve ever seen the statues, remember my beloved’s forehead and chin and you’ll get the picture.

In the end he’d gotten a little too chatty and a faction had tried to roast him over the flames. We rescued him before he got too singed, but he’d been shot with a poisoned dart in the escape and I had a very real fear of losing him once we were back in the Tardis.

I already knew about regeneration, of course, having lived through it myself.

“Do you need to die?” I asked him, laying him on a bed in the med bay.

“What kind of a question is that?” he huffed out.

“Do you need to regenerate to fix this?” I snapped.

“Two day’s rest, tops. You worry too much.”

“You get shot too much,” I told him, listening to the Tardis and feeling her reassurance.

“You know it’s always going to be difficult for you and me,” he said, closing his eyes, seeming to fight against the pain.

“I know; I’ve a book to prove it.”

“Just remember I don’t always look the same.”

“I know that, you gave me pictures of all your faces.”

“But I didn’t know you as them,” he said. “It’s not likely you’ll see any of them.”

“How can you know that?”

“Spoilers,” he gasped out. “Just trust me. We’re backwards. You’re going to have to learn how to lie. How to pretend you don’t know things.”

“This doesn’t seem to be the right time for this lecture, sweetie,” I told him, getting out the instruments the Tardis was prompting me to.

“Nonsense, always have good timing,” he said, twisting around. “Just promise me you won’t give away the future if you can help it. If you can’t help it, you won’t, and there’s always something that can get slipped. I’m the Eleventh Doctor, remember that. If you see somebody you don’t recognize that’s an older me. If you see somebody who doesn’t recognize you, that’d be a younger me. But you won’t, because you didn’t. Maybe.”

“You’re not making any sense and you’re starting to turn purple,” I told him, storing all this information away in my memory.

“River,” he said breathily, taking my hand, “I can’t promise you it will be easy. You’re going to start meeting younger versions of me. You won’t have the freedom you do now. You’ll meet younger versions of your parents. You’ll know things no one else will. Foreknowledge is a bad thing. It’s a burden I trust you with.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised him, kissing his forehead, while he slipped into unconsciousness.

While he mended I took out my diary and studied all the pictures of him. He’d been so many different men. Old, young, all sizes and shapes. Getting gradually younger and younger it seemed, while, in reality, getting older and older. His last face: glasses and some really great hair, skinny, and those eyes…much more in pain than my Doctor’s. I wished I could know him, but I knew that I wouldn’t. He wouldn’t know me.

The Doctor healed and I went back to Stormcage, but I kept all his words, wrote them down as best I could, and prepared for a much harder future.

***

I got a summons one day. A summons to America. I hadn’t been there in awhile and I packed my bags with an excitement I hadn’t felt in ages.

The Doctor was there and so were my parents. I could tell they didn’t know who I was yet, but he did. We were from three different times and the Doctor seemed to have such a burden on him. Even worse than when he’d left my parents or when I’d first met him.

“I've been running...faster than I've ever run, and I've been running my whole life. Now it's time for me to stop. And tonight I'm going to need you all with me.”

“Okay, we're here, what's up?”

“A picnic! And then a trip. Somewhere different, somewhere brand new.”

“Where?”

“Space...1969.”

And I instantly shut down my emotions, holding them in, showing nothing. The Doctor gave me an ironic smile and there was a feeling of terror in my gut. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I didn’t think it could be good.

We went to the lake and, despite its beauty and warmth, I felt cold and fake, like I hadn’t felt for a long time.

Then it happened. A nightmare from my childhood rose from the lake and the Doctor went out to meet it. And he died.

He was killed in the middle of his regeneration cycle and I’d never hated anything in my life the way I hated that spaceman. I emptied every bullet I had into it, but it was already gone. And I was left to honor the Doctor’s wishes.

Poor Amy, she was so desperate, and I didn’t like the look in my father’s eyes, but they could know nothing of the torment raging inside of me. Because I couldn’t recall just yet, but it all seemed so familiar somehow. Like I’d lived it before. 

We went back to the diner and there he was. That cold, heartless, miraculous man. I wanted to kiss him, but a slap was even better. 

Oh, the feeling of loss when I realized this was the youngest Doctor I had ever met. He didn’t even know who I was. His words from before were coming true and I wasn’t ready.

I knew where we were going and Amy got us there. Not me. No, the Doctor didn’t trust me and his words felt like whip lashes when he said them. I held my ground because that’s what my Doctor would want, but it was painful. So very painful.

And we landed in 1969. I’d been on one side of the story already. I’d seen Canton and I’d watched my mother try to shoot me and I’d even seen me as I was now. If you want to get really confusing, I was actually there three times if you count my mother’s pregnancy.

But worse than all that were the memories that kept coming back to me. I knew that I was the person who had been in that spacesuit. I was in prison for murder. I couldn’t remember why. I had to have killed the Doctor.

Though that paled in comparison with the lack of shared experiences between us. I told my parents so.

“The Doctor’s death doesn’t frighten me, nor does my own. There’s a far worse day coming for me.”

Still, meeting Nixon was a tad exciting. But it was very hard to keep my secrets and I wanted to have a little time to process alone.

The Silence were there and more snippets of memory came back. I had killed the Doctor, I had married the Doctor. He was still alive.

Exploring down in those tunnels with my father gave me an opportunity I wished I’d had more of back in the days when I was Mels. There is nobody better suited for listening to you than Rory Williams and I’d had too many secrets back then and too many nefarious reasons for having them. I still had too many secrets, but my reasons were nobler and more pliable.

“What did you mean? What you said to Amy. There's a worse day coming for you.”

“When I first met the Doctor, a long, long time ago...he knew all about me. Think about that. Impressionable young girl, and, suddenly this man just drops out of the sky, he's clever and mad and wonderful and knows every last thing about her. Imagine what that does to a girl.”

“I don't really have to.”

No, no, he wouldn’t. My father had been at ground zero for a situation just like that.

“Trouble is, it's all back to front. My past is his future. We're travelling in opposite directions. Almost every time we meet, I know him more, he knows me less. I live for the days when I see him. But I know that every time I do, he'll be one step further away. And the day's coming, when I'll look into that man's eyes...my Doctor...and he won't have the faintest idea who I am. And I think it's going to kill me.”

I couldn’t bear to look at Rory after I said that. It had been the most revealing thing I’d told anybody in a long time.

I felt bad I couldn’t reveal important things to him. I couldn’t tell him I was his daughter, that his wife was pregnant, that she was actually hundreds of light years away. 

There hadn’t been much time for revealing after that. We had to split up for reconnaissance reasons. I remembered more and more of my past those three months, the more Silence I saw. I would forget and remember and forget and remember. An endless cycle of memories. But some facts never left me. It was as if a Time Lock had been broken in my head. I had killed the Doctor, I had married the Doctor, the Doctor was still alive. I clung to those three things.

But then I had to start lying. Not tell the Doctor, this young Doctor, that I was the little girl; that I had been brought up to kill him. It had to happen all naturally so I only revealed information that could be extrapolated from the circumstances. 

It was the second hardest thing I’ve ever had to do apart from killing him. But he was brilliant and we started a revolution and when he invited me to go with him I refused. I couldn’t. Not with the knowledge that I had about this Doctor. I’d wait for mine to come back.

It was still a shock when I realized that he hadn’t ever even kissed me before. It gave new meaning to the term one-sided relationship. I didn’t think that it would be the last kiss we would ever share together, but I finally realized that there would be a last. His words from before and my confidences to Rory echoed in my head and their full fulfillment suddenly sank in. 

***

Now it gets a bit tricky here.

I was still at Stormcage, still going on adventures, still meeting a few younger Doctors, but he always knew who I was. And that was something I clung to.

I came back to my cell one day and I found a message waiting for me. It had the coordinates and date of my birth on it and a message.

_This is the day the Doctor finds out who you are. Write it all down so you know what to tell Dad when he comes for you. You have to be there only at the end or you’ll cross your own time stream too much. We do have a habit of doing that, don’t we?_

Sounded like a paradox in the making. Ooh, fascinating.

So I went. I went to Demon’s Run, back to the place of my birth, back to where it had all started. I had read about it, back at the university and I’d already lived it a bit, but I’d never known that I had been the climax. That could really go to a girl’s head.

I was nervous. It felt like this was some kind of audition. Some sort of play that I had to be perfect in. This was what the Doctor was trusting me with. Time itself.

I broke out and went to my stashed vortex manipulator that I kept for emergencies just like this. And the stories ran through my head.

_Demons run when a good man goes to war.  
Night will fall and drown the sun when a good man goes to war.  
Friendship dies and true love lies.  
Night will fall and the dark will rise when a good man goes to war.  
Demons run but count the cost,  
The battle's won but the child is lost._

I took in the situation. Oh, that horrible tableau laid out before me. My parents looking just as I remembered them looking back in those days of so long ago, that summer before I met the Doctor.

And the Doctor. At his lowest point.

“Well, then, soldier, how goes the day?”

“Where the hell have you been? Every time you've asked, I have been there. Where the hell were you today?”

It’s hard to be blamed for something that’s not your fault.

“I couldn't have prevented this.”

“You could've tried!”

“And so, my love, could you.”

“You think I wanted this?” He gestured wildly. He was so young. “I didn't do this. This...this wasn't me!”

“This was exactly you. All this, all of it. You make them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you'd become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name? Doctor? The word for healer and wise man, throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word ‘Doctor’ means mighty warrior. How far you've come. And now they've taken a child...the child of your  
best friends...and they're going to turn her into a weapon, just to bring you down. And all this, my love...in fear of you."

All the words flowed out of me. As if they were meant to be, as if the Tardis was feeding them to me, as if I’d always known them. Secret words he’d whispered to me during the time we’d spent together, my own resentment and guilt over my past, fears and whispers from races all over the universe, written down and spread as legend. I’m an archeologist, if you recall? I know it all. The Doctor: the man the universe held in awe and never ceased to tell stories about. Even after Gallifrey was lost and the Timelords themselves were only a memory he lived on.

I knew him, but he didn’t know me. 

“Who are you?”

I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t have a script for this. The history books don’t say what happened at the end of Demon’s Run. Only that the Doctor vanished. But I found my own way to tell him via the loving work of a girl just dead.

And it was a relief to have him know again. To have him know I was Melody, if not the whole truth. Oh, the look on his face…

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“But...but that means...”

“I'm afraid it does.”

It was like it always is with him. Awkward and wonderful and like a dance only we two would ever know.

“How do I look?”

“Amazing.”

“I'd better be.”

“Yes, you'd better be.”

So many little girls and little boys and worlds and races and friends and me counted on it.

The Doctor left and he didn’t know everything. He didn’t know who I'd been once I'd climbed out of that suit or that I would kill him. But it was enough.

That did leave me with my mother pointing a gun at me again. Honestly, I was starting to get a complex. Rory tried to stop her, of course.

“It's okay, Rory, she's fine, she's good. It's the Tardis translation matrix; it takes a while to kick in with the written word. You have to concentrate.”

She waited a beat.

“I still can't read it.”

Rory took away the gun.

“It's because it's Gallifreyan and doesn't translate. But this will.” I gave her the prayer leaf. “It's your daughter's name in the language of the forest.”

“I know my daughter's name.”

“Except they don't have a word for pond because the only water in the forest is the river.” Rory looked at me sharply at that, I didn’t know why, but my father is very clever. “The Doctor will find your daughter and he will care for her whatever it takes and I know that. It's me. I'm Melody. I'm your daughter.”

The writing had changed for them; they could see the River Song, (more accurately Song River, but it sounds better the other way).

The looks on their faces were less wonderful. I don’t think it was a comfort to them to know that the mad, mysterious River Song was somehow their daughter. But I took them home via the vortex manipulator and though it was rather a bumpy and interesting ride, I couldn’t tell them anything more than that. Which was so very hard.

“Don’t go,” Amy begged me once they were back in Leadworth and I knew that my younger self was going to crash in on them at any moment.

“I can’t stay,” I said gently. “But…Mother, I promise, it will be okay. You’ll see me again very soon.”

I made to leave and Rory stopped me, looking into my eyes for a long moment and I saw again the broken soldier of my past. He seemed to find what he was looking for though because then he stepped aside and I went back to Stormcage.

I needed to grieve a little myself. Living through events multiple times is rather traumatic.

I learned to get over it. I learned to move on. I saw the Doctor again, my Doctor, the one who knew me, and once he found out where I was in time, he comforted me. And he made sure he was always with me on my birthday.

There was a time when I was in a bar on Mitas 5. I was having a little celebratory time with me, myself, and I. And a few blokes from the Siroe Sector. It was my birthday, after all.

I was just starting to feel pleasantly sauced when the Doctor showed up. At first I thought it was the influence of the drinks, (never trust a Twyss bartender), but there were distinctly two Doctors in front of me.

“Ah, River Song,” they said in tandem, “many happy returns.”

“You two will be the death of me,” I said and fell off my stool, though they both seemed rather stricken to the bone at the suggestion.

When I woke up I was on the Tardis and there were party streamers and the smell of cake.

Both Doctors were leaning over me with a stethoscope each.

“Are we breaking the space time continuum today or are you both feeling frisky?” I asked, sitting up.

“Don’t be silly,” Doctor One said.

“We’re here to celebrate,” Doctor Two said.

“Absolutely, a grand party,” Doctor One agreed.

“Had so much fun the first time, I popped round again,” Doctor Two said.

“Any chance I get a really good birthday present?” I asked, stretching back and putting my hands behind my head.

“You bet.”

“None better.”

“We’re very good,” they said together. “Ta da!”

They spread their arms out and made a sort of bridge of their hands and ushered my parents through it.

“That’s not exactly what I meant,” I said, but I sprang up and hugged them anyway.

“Don’t even ask how they’re doing this,” Amy said as she hugged me. “They’re impossible.”

“Worse than gangers,” Rory agreed, giving me a much more tentative hug.

“Where are we going?” I asked, clapping my hands together.

“Somewhere better than ever before,” the Doctors said smugly.

Though the mudslide and consequent universe saving got a bit old, it was the best birthday I’d ever had.

The Doctor did like to give good birthday parties.

In fact, it was my birthday when Stevie Wonder sang in 1814 at the last great frost fair. The Doctor was a terrible ice skater and he fell quite a lot. I laughed even more than usual that trip and I felt very young. Like a little girl on holiday.

Which is perhaps why it was so hard when I got back and my father was waiting for me. My father who didn’t know me.

“Dr. Song? It's Rory. Sorry, have we met yet? Time streams, I'm not quite sure where we are...”

And I very much wanted him to really know me. I wanted a hug from my father on my birthday. I wanted him to give me a pony.

“Yes. Yes, we've met. Hello, Rory.”

“What's wrong?”

Sees too clearly, my dad does.

“It's my birthday.”

Despite the fact that Rory had technically been at every birthday of my childhood, (not to mention the mudslide birthday), blowing up balloons and making the cakes and cycling for miles to get me presents, I still just…wanted him to know me now.

But he was a young Rory and he had come on something very important. I could tell.

“He needs you!”

I had a suspicion, (the Roman gear a dead giveaway really), and I looked in my book. 

“Demon’s Run.”

“How...how did you know?”

“I'm from his future. I always know.”

I had to keep this light. I had to hide my emotions. But my dad was having none of that. This was too raw for him.

“They've taken Amy. And our baby.”

I’m the baby! I wanted to scream it out and change my own timeline. But I couldn’t. That might mean risking the Doctor and I would never, ever do that.

“The Doctor's getting some people together, we're going after her, but he needs you too.”

“I can't. Not yet, anyway.”

“I'm sorry?”

And there was my threatening legend of a father. The Last Centurion. Protector and Guardian, Patient and Formidable. Warrior through time.

My dad could beat up your dad. Of course he'd probably try to nurse him back to health afterwards.

“This is the Battle of Demon’s Run. The Doctor's darkest hour. He'll rise higher than ever before and then fall so much further. And...I can't be with him till the very end.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is it. This is the day he finds out who I am.”

Rory didn’t give up. He tried again, but I’d shaken him a bit and he was in too much of a hurry to try convincing me when he was anxious to get to Amy and his daughter.

I slowly changed back into more fifty-second century clothing and began to cry.

“Tears, River?”

I looked up and there was the Doctor. He was still wearing that ridiculous beaver hat that I’d told him he was never allowed to wear ever again despite how ‘cool’ it apparently was.

“What, you still here?” I asked, trying to sound light, but the effect was rather ruined by my tear-streaked face. “My, my, you’ll give a girl an ego as big as yours.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish I could have given you to them. They would be the best parents.”

“They already were,” I reminded him.

“Do you want to go on another trip?” he asked. “I’ve got the perfect place. You’ll never want to leave.”

“Just sit with me for awhile,” I told him. “Just rest in one place. Don’t save, don’t run, just be.”

He nodded, not looking very comfortable, but he sat down.

“Tell me about my parents,” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder.

“Only if you do the same for me,” he said. “Tit for tat." He made a face. "Um, horrible expression, never mind, but tell me some stories too and you’ve got a deal.”

We sat there for a few hours, reminiscing. My life has always been about the Doctor, but my parents were heavily entwined in our story and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

After he left, giving me a hug rather than a kiss, I set my vortex manipulator and went back and gave myself my message. Paradox circle closed. How about that?

***

A few years passed after that and I saw my parents occasionally, in the company of the Doctor and without. I saw the Doctor less and less, but he always knew me.

Until one day when my cellblock received a phone call. Winston Churchill trying to reach the Doctor. The Tardis rerouted it to me, which I think is rather a compliment. In fact the entire line of messages that I was to pass on was rather clever.

I did have to dupe a rather innocent new guard, but I’ve always loved a good snog.

I made my way to the Royal Gallery on the Starship UK and found what Winston had left for me. It was horrible. I knew right away that this was more important than so many of the other things the Doctor had warned me about. He’d mentioned something once about the Tardis exploding, it had something to do with why my father had become a Roman and was at the beginning of the Silence’s war against the Doctor. It was all a bit confusing. 

So I tried calling him immediately after a little tet-a-tete with Liz X. The infuriating man couldn’t or wouldn’t answer his phone and I had no indication that the psychic paper would work and so I was left with no other alternatives but to leave a message somewhere very old indeed. I had no doubt the Doctor would go there one of these days. 

So that meant I needed transportation. I knew right who to go to. Even though he had technically died already for me. Yes, time’s a bit weird, have I mentioned that enough yet?

Poor Dorium, it did seem a bit cruel to threaten him with a Callisto Pulse when I already knew the manner of his death. But I paid him well enough for it and I knew he’d helped my Doctor with information more than once.

I delivered my little message and made it back to 102 AD in plenty of time to welcome the Doctor. And get a little pampering in along the way. As much as those guards at Stormcage are ever so helpful they don’t really give massages to convicted criminals. But Cleopatra certainly gets them.

Oh, and my Doctor was so very young now. He didn’t even know to figure out where we were. It hurt more each time something like that happened. But I played those things very close to the chest and I’d finally gotten used to the idea of us traveling apart from each other. Intellectually at least.

Amy was with him this time, but my father was nowhere to be seen. I was a bit puzzled by that, they’d told me so little about that year or so they’d traveled with him, but this was Rome and my father was a Roman once… I hadn’t seen him around the camp but Rome was a vast empire.

Amy had obviously met me before but she didn’t have a clue as to who I was. She was spoilering me now, but her vague mentions gave me hope that we would see this through, whatever the Pandorica was. Because, though time can be rewritten, it also likes to give itself helpful hints. Trust me on that.

We found our way to the Underhenge and explored in a very archeological fashion. I just love digs. But this one was a little more fraught with danger than usual which meant my love was absolutely fascinated and it was like pulling teeth to get him to pay attention to the fact that every enemy he’d ever made was coming right to where he was.

He sent me for reinforcements. I was the fastest on a horse and the one with the lipstick. Unfortunately the General had returned while we were away and he was just a little bit cross at the little fibs being perpetuated on his troops. Poor darling.

The entire time I was talking to him I kept getting a niggling feeling in the back of my mind. I still hate it when that happens. It meant that something important was right in front of me and I was missing it. Something the Tardis was trying to remind me of. I almost felt like I recognized him from somewhere. I couldn’t immediately think of where and I had more important things to worry about. We were all barbarians compared to the mighty forces assembling overhead.

And that’s when Rory showed up. Imagine my surprise to meet my father as a Roman, only to see that he had never met me before. It all had to be playing into some part of the Rory that I knew’s past, only I had no idea what it was. It was a bit like being back at the beginning, not knowing things. It was slightly refreshing if also vastly irritating.

Still, I sent Rory on to the Doctor with the volunteers he’d rounded up and I went for the Tardis so the Doctor could do his precious analyzing. I already knew what I needed to know. I knew the Doctor should run.

Not that the Tardis was doing very well. She knew who I was all right, but she was agitated, anxious, not acting at all like she normally does. She wouldn’t fly normally. I almost began to understand all of the Doctor’s frustration about her always doing what she wanted instead of what he did. 

I didn’t know if she was feeling nostalgic or what, but she took me back to my childhood. Back to Amy’s big, empty house that had always given me the shudders no matter how much time I spent there. I didn’t know what year it was, but it was night and I figured I’d better see what she wanted me to see and get back to the Doctor. Someone had been there. Something I didn’t recognize and I figured this had to be after we’d all left because that definitely hadn’t happened during our childhood.

I went through the familiar rooms, but was drawn to Amy’s, to where I’d spent half of one of my childhoods anyway. 

That’s where it hit me anew how little I had known the Doctor back then. Back when I thought he had to die for the good of the universe. For the good of my best friend who couldn’t get over one little encounter with him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not so blindly in love with him that I can’t see his faults and that entire house was one of them. He’d hurt my mother so very deeply and, by extension, me and Rory, and all the rest of our lives had been bound up in his decisions.

“Oh, Doctor, why do I let you out?”

But then all of that wasn’t important because I remembered where I’d seen the General before. I remembered why Rory as a Roman had always seemed so fitting back when I’d first heard about it as Mels. I remembered countless hours of playtime and fun, all in this room. And I knew that they were all in danger. So much danger.

I rushed back to the Tardis taking the books and pictures with me and I called the Doctor. My mind was racing even as I did it because I couldn’t let on all that I knew. For the Doctor, Amy and Rory, none of this had happened yet and it hadn’t happened yet for me either so I didn’t understand the why, but the effects of this event had happened for me. It was all a little bit confusing and I tried to sound urgent without giving too much away. Even being ignorant if you like, trying to get him to guess. 

“They're not real, they can't be. They're all right here in the story book, those actual Romans, the ones I sent you, the ones you're with right now. They're all in a book in Amy's house, a children's picture book. Doctor, how is this possible?”

“Something's using her memories, Amy's memories.”

“But how?”

“You said something had been there.”

“Yes, there's burn marks on the grass outside, landing patterns.”

Think, my brilliant Doctor, think! Figure it out.

“If they've been to her house, they could have used her psychic residue. Structures can hold memories, that's why houses have ghosts. They could've taken a snapshot of Amy's memories. But why?”

“Doctor, who are those Romans?”

And why is my dad one of them?

“Projections. Or duplicates.”

“But they were helping us. My lipstick even worked.”

And Rory was Rory. He’d known all about the Doctor.

“They might think they're real. The perfect disguise. They actually believe their own cover story, right until they're activated.”

And that’s when the fear hit me. So very hard. I suddenly understood comments and looks my father had made that I never understood, penances for an unknown guilt, and reassurances my mother had given. 

To top it all off my parent’s wedding day was apparently the worst day of all time and I couldn’t fly the Tardis out of there. The one day I think he could have flown her better than me and he wasn’t there. Typical Doctor. 

I couldn’t get out. The Tardis was frozen and fracturing like I’d never seen before and I can’t describe what happened next. My mother Tardis was in so much pain and I could hear her screaming inside every inch of me. The downfall of having a direct link into the only source of huon energy in the universe.

And she still protected me. In the midst of her pain and crisis, she cut me off from the explosion and put me into a time loop.

Which got very monotonous after awhile, let me tell you.

Then he saved me.

“Hi, honey, I’m home.”

“And what sort of time do you call this?”

Oh, I wouldn’t give up times like that for anything.

We landed back on Earth and it was rather thrilling to see him using my vortex manipulator. A bit like watching an established coffee hater chugging an espresso.

“Amy! And the plastic centurion?”

(Father, Father, Father, I know you. The best dad in the universe.)

“It's okay, he's on our side.”

(Oh, is he ever. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for Amy.)

“Really? I dated a Nestene duplicate once... swappable head…it did keep things fresh. Right then, I have questions. But number one is this...what in the name of sanity have you got on your head?”

Priorities. Whether he knew it or not he was my husband and I have standards.

“It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezes are cool.”

That’s what he thinks. Thank goodness my mother has some sense. Of course, after we exterminated the fez, we had to run to keep from being exterminated ourselves.

I’d never seen a Dalek before. Heard all about them naturally, read about every documented encounter they’d ever had with the Doctor, but I’d never met one.

Not that I’d been particularly anxious to, but considering how much I ran with the Doctor, it had to happen eventually.

Then the Doctor started blathering on about it getting in somewhere else.

“Now, that means we've got exactly…four and a half minutes before it's at lethal capacity.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that's when it's due to kill me.”

Excuse me? Does he have to die every time I meet him?

“Kill you? What do you mean, kill you?”

“Oh, shut up, never mind. How can that Dalek even exist?”

He went on like that. Talking about everything and nothing, working it all out. And with absolutely no help from me. This one was all him.

Of course he was being ridiculous and none of us understood him properly, going on about the Pandorica’s restoration field.

“The box contains a memory of the universe, and the light transmits the memory. And that's how we're going to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Relight the fire. Reboot the universe. Come on!”

I have to admit I absolutely love when he goes manic like that.

“Doctor, you're being completely ridiculous. The Pandorica partially restored one Dalek. If it can't even reboot a single life form properly, how will it reboot the whole of reality?

“What if we give it a moment of infinite power? Transmit the light from the Pandorica to every particle of space and time simultaneously?”

“Well, that would be lovely, dear, but we can't, because it's completely impossible.”

“Ah, no, you see, it's not.”

And I wanted to hear what amazing, crazy idea he had now. But his death projection timing was getting rather good and then he disappeared on me.

Just wait till I got my hands on a version of him that knew me.

Rory was busy shooting at the Dalek and Amy was busy doing that quiet, death-like trance thing she did every time the Doctor died. But she knew enough to tell me where he went.

“Show me!”

“River, he died.”

“Systems restoring! You will be exterminated!”

“We've got to move. That thing's coming back to life.”

“You go to the Doctor. I'll be right with you.”

I didn’t know what the Doctor was planning, but I did know the look in his eyes when he thought he wasn’t coming back. And nobody shoots my husband and gets away with it.

“You will be exterminated!” 

“Not yet, your systems are still restoring. Which means your shield density is compromised. One Alpha Mezon burst through your eyestalk would kill you stone dead.”

I do enjoy being smug when I’m going to kill something.

“Records indicate you will show mercy. You are an associate of the Doctor's.” 

“I'm River Song.” I aimed the gun. “Check your records again.”

There was a single space of time while the Dalek realized it was a very good thing the Daleks had never met River Song before.

“Mercy!” 

“Say it again.”

“Mercy!” 

“One more time.”

“Mercy!”

The Doctor has taught me a bit about mercy, but I’ve never been very good at putting it into practice.

I joined my parents downstairs where the Doctor had vanished from where they’d left him. 

“But he was dead.”

You’ll learn as I did, Mother.

“Who told you that?”

“He did.”

“Rule one. The Doctor lies.”

“Where's the Dalek?”

“It died.”

The Doctor was in the Pandorica. Doing what, I had no idea.

“Doctor, can you hear me? What were you doing?”

Behind me my parents asked questions and I could feel time compressing.

“What’s happening?”

“History is being erased. Time is running out. Doctor, what were you doing? Tell us! Doctor?”

Then I understood. Oh, I understood. It was the most brilliant, clever idea. And it would be the end of everything.

“Oh!”

“What?”

“The Tardis is still burning. It's exploding at every point in history. If you threw the Pandorica into the explosion, right into the heart of the fire...”

“Then what?”

“Then let there be light. The light from the Pandorica would explode everywhere at once, just like he said.”

“That would work? That would bring everything back?”

“A restoration field, powered by an exploding Tardis, happening at every moment in history.” 

My love had set everything up. But there were a few minor adjustments I could make, so I did. So I wouldn’t think about the end.

Even he didn’t know what would happen. He thought he was saving all of us and sacrificing himself. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know he was the reason for my existence. Him and the Tardis. If they never existed then I would never exist either. Every page of my blue book would go completely blank. The book itself would disappear.

And he didn’t even know what he was missing.

“Amy, I need Amy,” he said wearily.

I swallowed my hurt and went to get my mother.

“Amy...he wants to talk to you.”

“So, what happens here? Big Bang Two? What happens to us?”

“We all wake up where we ought to be. None of this ever happens and we don't remember it.”

A little lie with the ‘we’ bit, but they didn’t need to know that. 

“River...tell me he comes back too.”

“The Doctor will be at the heart of the explosion.”

“So?”

So my heart is going to crack into a million pieces, Mother, and then I’m going to die.

“So all the cracks in time will close, but he'll be on the wrong side. Trapped in the never-space, the void between the worlds. All memory of him will be purged from the universe. He will never have been born. Now, please, he wants to talk to you before he goes.”

“Not to you?”

“He doesn't really know me yet. Now he never will.”

And I hoped he would be proud of my bravery. Everything I was doing I was doing for him. Because that’s how he would do it. I’d grown up and learned quite a bit since Silencio and that aborted timeline that never existed.

We said our goodbyes and the Doctor flew into the skies, like he always does. But this time there would be no coming back. If he had any clever plans he wasn’t letting me in on them.

But there I was at the end of it all, and my parents were there. If I couldn’t have him, at least I could have them. Perhaps they might have thought it was weird that this almost stranger was clutching their hands, keeping them from holding each other. But I needed my parents.

It was a curious feeling, being erased. A little bit like living your life backwards, but my life had never been linear and something about my connection to the Tardis did something to keep me from going out of existence altogether. It caused some sort of link between me and my parents and Leadworth. The universe was trying to put things back where they were supposed to go but my events weren’t in place for that to happen. But the first part was. A wedding, a very central point in time. I could see that now, having understood about the cracks. And so I was sent there to June 26th, 2010 and it turned out I attended their wedding after all. Mels wasn’t there now for two reasons, I never used to go to weddings and I had technically never existed.

I was almost a phantom. I had the solidity left to carry my blank, blue diary, (a miracle it even existed,) but that was about it. But I did have a purpose, because in viewing my own situation, I now understood. That link keeping me from fading was in my mother’s head.

Amy, the girl who waited, who had grown up with the time crack pouring into her dreams every night until the night the Doctor came. It was her memory that had brought those Romans to life, had brought Rory back from non-existence. And, somehow, someway, she remembered me and if she could do that…well, she could do a lot of things. Things involving my wayward husband and a big, blue box.

Blue rather like my diary cover and I thought I understood the Doctor’s plan, what he must have said to Amy before he flew the Pandorica into the Tardis. And I’m nothing if not a good wife. So I left Amy my diary, hoping that would trigger her memory. As I walked past the window, barely holding onto existence, I knew that I had succeeded.

I waited outside for the Doctor to come out. I knew he would. In the meantime I had some sorting out to do. My memories had all changed now. I supposed everything that had been swallowed by the cracks in time was now restored. Which meant I had new grandparents.

Those funny little people inside with my parents were my grandparents and I’d known them all my life. I could remember Augustus, (I immediately decided to call him Grandpa Gus), giving me piggy back rides and Gramma Tabby stuffing me with food when she thought I was too skinny. All those hours playing in Amy’s bedroom had suddenly become infused with warmth and food and security.

Not that I didn’t remember it the way it had been before. That’s the problem with being the child of the Tardis and at the epicenter of a big bang, you remembered things. It wouldn’t be that hard for me, after all, my life had been full of contradictions and changes and memory erasure and regaining. It’s a wonder I don’t have brain damage. But I’m used to it and I’ve got a lot of natural understanding of how those things work. What worried me more was how Amy and Rory would handle it.

In the meantime, I waited for the Doctor. Like I always do. I sat down by the Tardis, patting her side. I owed quite a lot to her.

“Thank you,” I breathed into the night air.

Eventually he came out and headed straight for the Tardis.

“Did you dance? Well, you always dance at weddings, don't you?” I asked, recalling a rather celebratory one we’d been roped into attending on a ship going past Orion’s belt involving a sacrificial chicken, the sonic screwdriver, and a rather horrified Rabbi.

“You tell me.”

“Spoilers.”

I did delight in taunting him with that word as he had once taunted me.

He handed me my diary back.

“The writing's all back, but I didn't peek.”

“Thank you.”

He handed me the vortex manipulator back. Ah, my way home.

“Are you married, River?”

“Are you asking?”

I took my time with looking up, enjoying this.

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

And then he caught on. He always does eventually.

“No, hang on. Did you think I was asking you to marry me, o-o-or asking if you were married?”

“Yes.”

“No, but was that ‘yes,’ or ‘yes?’ ”

“Yes.”

It was a different sort of fun that I didn’t often get to have with him. It was almost, dare I say it, tender.

“River...who are you?”

Not that he would let it stay that way. He has such an insatiable curiosity. 

“You're going to find out very soon now. And I'm sorry, but that's when everything changes.”

Because then the burden of foreknowledge would fall on him in his timestream. And I liked being able to carry it for him.

But there was nothing more to be said, no kiss to be had from so young a Doctor, no shared history. So I simply left and went back to Stormcage to wait for our next encounter.


	3. Part Three

I did meet an older version of the Doctor after that at Stormcage. Almost like he was waiting for me. I wouldn’t put it past him. As my mother told me once, he’s very old and very kind.

I didn’t slap him, but I came close to it. 

“I understand what you did for me now,” he said quietly.

The desire to slap him vanished.

“Well,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, “who wouldn’t?”

“Lots of people. I would even go so far as to say gaggles.”

“That is daring of you,” I said, rolling my eyes. 

“Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” I said, putting my arm through his. “Now take me somewhere nice as a thank you present like a good boy.”

He clapped his hands together and tugged me into the Tardis. The doors closed on the usual warning bells that announced I was leaving my prison.

“I once took you on a picnic,” he said, racing around. “It was a good picnic, didn’t like the wine, but the ending was rather spoiled by my untimely death, wouldn’t you say? Yes, so, picnic it is. We are going to reclaim picnics in the name of…something grand anyway. Are you ready?”

“Always.”

He muttered some more, throwing switches, and then yelled at me to get something from the wardrobe to wear. I made my way there and felt the Tardis tell me what kind of clothes to get. It would be an interesting picnic if the fur coat was anything to go by.

After I was dressed I rejoined the Doctor, (still stubbornly in his bowtie), and we stepped outside.

“Asgard,” I said, clasping my hands together in sarcastic delight. “You romantic fool.”

“Oh yes, talk like that by all means,” he said, taking my hand. “I’m sure to take you on all sorts of adventures then.”

I noticed he had a picnic basket flung over one shoulder. I let him lead me to a lovely patch of snow and we set up our picnic. It was all my favorite foods and while prison fare had definitely improved quite a lot since my experiences in them as Mels, this fare was far more excellent than anything I got at Stormcage.

“Are you sure Canada is quite a good enough place for such a special trip?” I asked sarcastically.

“Baffin Island is one of the most gorgeous spots in the universe,” he said smugly. “Took Leela here once and her eyes positively boggled.”

“Likely with the cold,” I said. “I’ve seen that leather bikini in the wardrobe.”

The Doctor tripped putting up a parasol.

“Don’t tell me,” I said, taking pity on him, “you got it from the Idreni.”

“They’re craftsmen!” he snapped at me and I stifled a smile.

“Ooh, we are grouchy today being beholden to me, aren’t we?”

“What? Oh, yes, I mean, no. I mean, rude, aren’t you? I mean, presumptuous. Ow!” he said, holding his finger to his mouth.

“Let me see,” I said wearily.

He held it out to me hesitantly. It was only a little nick in the skin, but I kissed it better anyway.

“That doesn’t really work, you know,” he said smugly. “That’s human-y, silly stuff thinking it will be better – oh, oh, it doesn’t hurt anymore. How did you do that?”

“You should see all my brands of lipstick, Doctor,” I told him, laughing. 

He finally started laughing with me and we sat down to eat.

“It’s a funny old world,” he said.

“World?” I queried.

“Universe,” he corrected himself with a grin. “Here’s you and I living our lives separately and together, backward and forward, knowing all, knowing nothing. I’ve known for ages what you’d done, but I couldn’t tell you until you’d lived through it. Rather puts the spontaneity out of life.”

“Somehow you manage, sweetie,” I said, enjoying the rare delicacies he’d brought from alien worlds.

“I’m being dramatic,” he said.

“I know.”

“Well, stop interrupting me. And being unimpressed.”

“Oh, Doctor, I’m way past unimpressed. We’re into not-even-fazed territory.”

He looked affronted, but I put my hand on his shoulder and kissed his cheek.

“I’m not kissing you goodbye,” he told me grumpily.

“I’ll live,” I said. “Oh, my love, you know perfectly well you’re the reason for my very existence and I don’t just mean that literally.”

“Fine, maybe a small kiss.”

It might have been the most peaceful, (and cold), of my trips with him. The only alien we encountered was him and no one tried to kill us even once. I think he was rather disappointed.

Quite frankly, so was I a little bit. But the scenery was amazing.

We parted ways with a medium-sized kiss, (flattery will get you anywhere), and I didn’t see him again for a long time.

I spent the years in between doing good deeds shaving off my life sentences. It was never quite enough for a pardon, but I was down to only nine thousand consecutive life sentences. In the meantime I did quite a lot of updating in my diaries. Oh yes, I have three actually. One that has all my encounters with the Doctor chronologically for me, one chronologically for him, and one with them pieced together. Time and space event organization, thy name is River Song.

I was on a mission once. At the Bone Meadows. It was right up my alley, moldy tombs and dead things to uncover. My team and I were in one of the tombs when my current watchdog tripped a trap and got a two ton boulder on his head for his trouble. I grabbed as many of the others as I could and we ran. We were almost at the outside and into the fresh air when I ran headlong into someone running back the other way.

Guess who?

“You’re running the wrong way, dear,” I informed him calmly and tugged him along with us while he protested the whole time.

“I was investigating,” he said loudly as soon as we were a safe distance away from the now collapsed tomb.

“You were investigating,” I said. “You would be a regenerating pancake if it weren’t for me.”

“You’ve got a bit too much of an opinion of yourself,” he said, sulking.

“No striking resemblance to your own character, I’m sure.”

“Have you ever met Jane Austen?” he asked.

“Take me and find out,” I said.

“Maybe when I’m older,” he said.

“You don’t know me yet?” I asked.

“I do, Melody Pond,” he said. “But only just.”

“Fancy,” I said. “Duck.”

Arrows shot over our head and we all started running. I hissed instructions for us all to meet back at the ship and pelted into the forest, running with the Doctor.

“Been awhile,” I said, panting slightly.

“Not for me,” he said, grinning.

“Lucky you, darling,” I said and peered around a tree.

“What’s all the shoot-y business about?” he asked. “You been disturbing things again?”

“I’ll have you know I’m on a sanctioned visit. But some of the local tribes are arguing over who gets what we dig up. Maybe they’ve decided to just come and get it themselves.”

“Right, well, then we should go and have a little chat with them.”

Several hours later, I looked from my locked hands to where the Doctor was hanging upside down from a tree.

“I don’t think insulting his family was a good plan for your little chat, my love.”

“You’re always nitpicking. Worse than a stereotype dressed up in a June Cleaver apron.”

That made me wonder.

“Silencio,” I said.

He looked at me and winced.

“What about it?”

“Have you been? It’s gorgeous.”

“It’s on my to-do list,” he said. “Hang on, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Spoilers,” I told him. “Just try and remember all the players in Berlin when I became me.”

There was a crash and he fell on his head. He stood up, blood streaming down his face and got me loose from everything but the handcuffs.

“One day I’m gonna chuck your little book into Silencio,” he grumbled.

“No, you won’t,” I said cheerfully, “that would rather waste however you got a hold of it, wouldn’t it? Now, hasten, my love, we’ve got a ship to catch and I’ve got a life sentence to get rid of.”

In the end I was given an honorary title and the freedom to dig anywhere in the Bone Meadows that I wanted. The Doctor was banned from ever returning to the system. The remaining members of my team and I took him back to the Tardis and I helped him stitch up his head after the handcuffs had finally been gotten off.

He wore the bandage around his head rather sideways, covering one eye.

“That’s pretty cool,” he crowed upon inspection in the mirror.

“Take another look,” I said and then stuck a sleeping draught in his neck.

He didn’t look very well, my Doctor, and I gathered he was running from Silencio at this point, without my parents, and desperately afraid. I ran my fingers through his hair and kissed his forehead and his lips.

“You’re the most amazing man I’ve ever met,” I told him. “But you already knew that. Now prove it to me once again. Come find me at Silencio.”

I kissed him again and left.

***

There came a day when I was summoned to a parole hearing. I was intrigued. I’d never heard it called that before. Every time before when I’d been given a task in order to get leniency it had all been done in secret, away from official records. But this time there was a soldier sitting on the other side of the glass.

“Do I get to keep him if I’m good?” I asked, sitting down.

“River Song, my name is Father Octavian, Bishop, second class. I have a proposition for you.”

I leaned forward.

“And we’ve only just met. Do tell.”

After grimacing rather meanly he did. And that’s how I learned about the existence of the Weeping Angels. 

I agreed to their terms. How could I not? A full pardon? That’s exactly the kind of thing I like to hear. Besides, it gave me an excuse to look up the Doctor.

Octavian stuck rather close; I think he was a little bit nervous, poor thing, having to deal with the notorious River Song.

“I know everything,” he warned me, growling again. I thought men of faith were supposed to be at peace, but he was very jumpy. I guess he did have a huge job in front of him. “All your records from the Teselecta itself. There’s nothing you’ve done that I don’t know about.”

“Now that I cannot believe,” I said, laughing as I dug through the musty old books looking for a certain volume. “Even I don’t know everything I’ll ever do.”

“You just keep to your part of the bargain!”

I saluted him mockingly and kept on.

We tracked the Angel to the _Byzantium_. I got to wear high heels and dance with some lovely men before I broke into the vault and left my message for the Doctor. Two birds. One stone. No waiting.

“Like I said on the dance floor, you might want to find something to hang on to!”

Flying through space is rather exhilarating. Landing on top of the Doctor: even better.

“Doctor?”

Amy was there then.

“River?” the Doctor asked from beneath me looking like he would far rather be facing an army of Daleks. 

Very young then.

“Follow that ship.”

He reluctantly obeyed but it soon became apparent to me that he was going to get us all killed if he kept on flying like that. I honestly don’t know how the Tardis puts up with it.

“Doctor, how come she can fly the Tardis?”

Mother didn’t know me very well either, did she?

“You call that flying the Tardis? Ha!”

He was grumpy that day apparently. No change there then. Well, I just had to take charge. 

“Okay. I've mapped the probability vectors, done a fold-back on the temporal isometry, charted the ship to its destination, and parked us right alongside.”

Then the male pride bit took over and he just had to prove he knew better than me.

“We're on Alfava Metraxis, the seventh planet of the Dundra System. Oxygen-rich atmosphere, toxins in the soft band, eleven hour day, and...chances of rain later.”

“He thinks he's so hot when he does that,” I told Amy, exasperated. 

And he really was, sadly.

“How come you can fly the Tardis?”

Amy could stick to a point like no one else I knew.

“Oh, I had lessons from the very best. It's a shame you were busy that day,” I called to the pouting Doctor. And dying was very busy certainly. “Right then, why did they land here?”

“They didn't land.”

“Sorry?”

“You should've checked the Home Box - it crashed.”

“What caused it to crash? Not me.”

We went on like that for several moments, arguing, evading. The usual pleasantries until Amy interrupted us.

“Aren't you going to introduce us?”

Very early days then. Oh, so very early. 

“Amy Pond, Professor River Song.”

“Ahhh, I'm going to be a Professor some day, am I? How exciting!” I laughed even while I was puzzled at how he obviously knew and didn’t know me. That man is impossible. “Spoilers!”

“Yeah, but who is she and how did she do that? She just left you a note in a museum!”

I could see they didn’t know each other so well either.

“Two things always guaranteed to show up in a museum: the Home Box of category-four starliner and, sooner or later, him,” I told her. “It's how he keeps score.”

“I'm nobody's taxi service!” the Doctor shouted at us. “I'm not gonna be there to catch you every time you feel like jumping out of a space ship.”

“And you are so wrong.” I waited a tick, just long enough for the wrong impression to get taken. “There's one survivor. There's a thing in the belly of that ship that can't ever die.” The Doctor stopped solid as I’d known he would. “Now he's listening.” Time to bring in the troops. “You lot in orbit yet? Yeah, I saw it land. I'm at the crash site. Try and home in on my signal.” I turned to the Doctor. “Doctor, can you sonic me? I need to boost the signal so we can use it as a beacon.”

A curtsy and some more minutes of grousing while I got things set up. But I figured I had better truly find my bearings.

“We have a minute. Shall we?” I opened my diary. “Where are we up to? Have we done the Bone Meadows?”

He didn’t answer my question, just looked horrified at the blue book that he would one day give me. I felt a straight bolt of fear in my chest. This had to be the youngest Doctor I’d ever met. Certainly the youngest Amy. And that meant my time was probably close.

Octavian arrived and we didn’t have any more time for pleasantries. 

“You promised me an army, Doctor Song.”

“No, I promised you the equivalent of an army. This is the Doctor.”

His eyes widened and I could practically see the wheels turning in his head. 

But he simply introduced himself and explained matters a bit.

“Doctor Song was helping us with a covert investigation. Has Doctor Song explained what we're dealing with?”

“Doctor, what do you know of the Weeping Angels?”

With that he was hooked and we set up our base of operations just inside the temple. I took the time to get changed and got everything set up to show the Doctor.

I forget in the times that I’m not with him what he’s like. I mean, I know what he’s like, I can’t ever forget it, but that’s nothing compared to actually being with him and watching his brilliant mind at work. It’s the most exhilarating feeling and no mere memory could ever hope to compete with that. 

I felt that anew while I watched him work out the mystery of our lone Lonely Assassin explaining to Amy who didn’t know anything about them.

But we had to explain things to him too. It was fascinating feeding him a bit of information and watching it churn around inside until something idiotic came out, masking some master plan.

I gave him the book I’d found.

“I found this. Definitive work on the Angels. Well, the only one. Written by a madman, it's barely readable, but I've marked a few passages.”

Sometimes he seems very human due to long exposure, but then he would do something like reading a book in seconds and it reminded you he’s so much more than that.

“Not bad, bit slow in the middle, didn't you hate his girlfriend? No, hang on, wait, wait!” Especially when he sniffs and licks things. “This book is wrong! What's wrong with this book, it's wrong.”

“Oh, it's so strange when you go all baby-face. How early is this for you?”

“Very early,” he said in a non-committal tone.

“So you don't know who I am yet?”

Knew that from the beach, but I’m here to play the game after all.

Then Amy got into a spot of trouble with an angel and managed to save herself. That’s my mother, ladies and gentlemen.

“I froze it! There was a sort of blip on the tape and I froze it on the blip. It wasn't the image of an angel any more. That was good, yeah? It was, wasn't it? That was pretty good.”

“That was amazing!”

Strange how I felt like the mother.

“River, hug Amy.”

“Why?”

“Cause I'm busy.”

“I'm fine,” Amy insisted.

“You're brilliant!” I told her, grasping her by the shoulders.

And so we prepared to go into the maze. My element, you might say. It really was a fascinating place and I wish I’d had more time there. We headed for the wreck of the _Byzantium_ after setting up a base.

Octavian stuck rather close.

“He doesn't know yet, does he? Who and what you are.”

“It's too early in his timestream,” I said stiffly.

“Well, make sure he doesn't work it out, or he's not gonna help us.”

How well he doesn’t know my Doctor.

“I won't let you down. Believe you me, I have no intention of going back to prison.”

Or staying there anyway.

I had to hurry to catch up with my mother and the Doctor. Amy was standing still rubbing her eye and I paused, suddenly concerned.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I'm fine. So, what's a maze of the dead?”

“Oh, it's not as bad as it sounds. It's just a labyrinth with dead people buried in the walls. Okay, that was fairly bad. Right give me your arm. This won't hurt a bit.”

I cheerfully injected her.

“Ow!”

“There, you see. I lied. It's a viro-stabiliser. Stabilises your metabolism against radiation, drive burn, anything. You're going to need it when we get  
up to that ship.”

That was to make up for the time she'd tricked me into getting an inoculation against influenza when I was a child.

“So what's he like? In the future, I mean. Cause you know him in the future, don't you?”

Her voice was full of girlish glee, dishing with a friend. Rather like our childhood sometimes. And that’s where she was at, it seemed. Flown off on the night before her wedding.

I suddenly missed my father.

“The Doctor? Well, the Doctor's the Doctor.”

“Oh, well, that's very helpful. Mind if I write that down?”

It was hard knowing everything but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be fun as well.

“Yes, we are,” I said, looking at the Doctor and smirking.

“Sorry, what?” he said in his I’m-very-busy-and-important voice.

“Talking about you.”

“I wasn't listening, I'm busy.”

“Ah. The other way up.”

The ridiculous man!

“You're so his wife,” Amy said triumphantly. 

I couldn’t be very surprised, but I couldn’t be confidential either.

“Oh, Amy, Amy, Amy! This is the Doctor we're talking about. Do you really think it could be anything that simple?”

“Yup.”

“You're good. I'm not saying you're right...but you are very good.”

And if only Rory were there, everything would have been fantastic.

Still, we kept going having a lovely conversation about the Aplans until Amy made a comment that made the Doctor stop in his tracks.

“Oh!”

“What's wrong?” Amy asked.

I followed the Doctor’s line of vision and it hit me as well. Oh, we were stupid that day.

“Oh.”

“Exactly.”

“How could we not notice that?”

“Low level perception filter, or maybe we're thick.”

“What's wrong, sir?” asked Octavian.

“Nobody move. Everyone stay exactly where they are. Bishop, I am truly sorry. I've made a mistake and we are all in danger.”

“What danger?”

Couldn’t they all see it? It was so glaringly obvious to me.

“The Aplans.”

“The Aplans?”

“They've got two heads.”

“Yes, I get that. So?”

“So why don't the statues?”

And we ran for our lives.

Imagine a maze full of statues. Imagine the statues moving. Imagine them all having the power to kill you. Imagine you walking in there thinking they were harmless and suddenly finding out they weren’t.

Life with the Doctor.

“Any suggestions?” I asked when we found out we couldn’t even reach our safety point.

“The statues are advancing on all sides and we don't have the climbing equipment to reach the _Byzantium_ ,” said Octavian, the pessimist.

I ignored him and spoke to the Doctor.

“There's no way up, no way back, no way out. No pressure, but this is usually when you have a really good idea.”

“There's always a way out. There's always a way out.”

And then the Angels made a mistake, using the Doctor’s faith and passion and compassion and love for life against him.

“You told me my fear would keep me alive but I died afraid, in pain and alone. You made me trust you, and when it mattered, you let me down,” said Angel Bob matter of factly.

The idea that the Angels could kill someone and use their consciousness to communicate was both fascinating and horrible.

“What are they doing?” Amy asked me.

“They're trying to make him angry.”

“Trust me?” the Doctor asked all of us.

“Yeah.”

“Always.”

“We have faith, sir.”

Then the Doctor held a gun. I had never seen that happen before. It was a little bit exciting.

And the Angels inquired after their mistake.

“Oh, big mistake. Huge. There's one thing you never put in a trap, if you're smart, if you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there is one thing you never, ever put in a trap.”

“And what would that be, sir?”

“Me!”

With a shot and a jump we were on the roof and let me tell you how very odd a feeling that is.

But the Angels were still coming and draining our power and the Doctor had the maddest idea ever to stop them doing it.

“Doctor, we lost the torches. We'll be in total darkness,” Amy pointed out.

“No other way. Bishop?”

Octavian turned to me.

“Dr Song, I've lost good Clerics today. You trust this man?”

“I absolutely trust him.”

No worries there.

“He's not some kind of madman then?”

Um…

“I absolutely trust him.”

Octavian leaned toward me menacingly and I could see the loss of every single one of his men in his eyes.

“I'm taking your word, because you're the only one who can manage this guy. But that only works so long as he doesn't know who you are. You cost me any more men, and I might just tell him. Understood?”

Me? Manage the Doctor? Oh, Octavian, how little you know.

“Understood,” I gritted out.

And the plan worked beautifully except we were now trapped.

“We need another way out of here.”

“There isn't one.”

“Yeah, there is, course there is. This is a galaxy class ship, goes for years between planet falls. So what do they need?” 

Insert: ‘River Song, the answerer of questions and completer of my sentences’ to the end of that sentence.

“Of course.”

It was rather beautiful. A great work of technology. 

“It's an oxygen factory.”

“It's a forest,” Amy said.

“Yeah, it's a forest, it's an oxygen factory.”

And then I noticed what Amy was saying and I grew afraid for some reason.

“You're counting,” I said as more time passed.

“Counting?”

“You're counting down. From ten. You have been for a couple of minutes.”

That’s where things got interesting as we all fled into the forest and the Doctor stayed behind. I wanted to strangle him. I’m particularly protective of Doctors younger than my own personal timestream. After all, a girl’s got to get born somehow.

Which made me very worried when Amy just curled up on a rock as she was a rather vital part of that process as well.

“Amy, what's wrong?”

“Four.”

Not a very heartening response.

“Med-scanner, now!”

Octavian got miss-ish again.

“Dr Song, we can't stay here, we've got to keep moving.”

“We wait for the Doctor,” I said calmly, scanning Amy.

“Our mission is to make this wreckage safe and neutralize the Angels. Until that is achieved-”

“Father Octavian, when the Doctor is in the room, your only mission is to keep him alive long enough to get everyone else home. And, trust me, it's not easy. Now, if he's dead back there, I'll never forgive myself, and if he's alive, I'll never forgive him. And…Doctor, you're standing right behind me, aren't you?”

“Oh, yeah.”

He always does that to me.

“I hate you!”

The Doctor examined Amy who was obviously afraid.

“So what's wrong with me?”

“Nothing, you're fine,” I soothed.

“Everything, you're dying.” 

“Doctor!”

“Yes, you're right, if we lie to her, she'll get all better! Right. Amy! Amy. What's the matter with Amelia? Something's in her eye. What does that mean? Doesn’t mean anything.”

“Doctor,” Amy tried.

“Busy.”

“Scared!” she shot back.

“Course, you're dying, shut up!”

I moved to put my arm on her. The Doctor is just like other people sometimes. He gets angry when he’s scared.

“It’s okay, let him think,” I told her.

The Doctor can focus unlike anything else in the universe and he’s not at all tactful about letting you know you’re getting in the way of that. I’d seen him do that before. He’d done it to me. In a crisis situation he needed people to shut up and let him do his job. In the end, it was brilliant, but the process itself was incredibly hard to go through.

And he does blather on a bit when he’s figuring things out.

He threw the communicator away in a rage and even I get scared when he’s upset like that.

But he did it; he saved her

“She's normalizing. You did it! You did it!”

But we were all still in danger and a possible solution involved leaving Amy and going off into the forest.

“How?” I asked.

“I'll do a thing.”

“What thing?”

“I don’t know; it's a thing in progress. Respect the thing. Moving out!”

“Doctor, I'm coming with you. My Clerics can look after Miss Pond. These are my best men, they'd lay down their lives in her protection.”

“I don't need you.”

“I don't care. Where Dr Song goes, I go,” Octavian said like the great big worrier he is.

“What? You two engaged or something?” the Doctor asked, looking intrigued.

“Yes, in a manner of speaking. Marco, you're in charge till I get back.”

I walked off with Octavian after shrugging at the Doctor. I felt…divided. After all it was only a matter of time before he found out what I had/had not done and that I was at Stormcage. I just didn’t like the idea that there was a Doctor in any time who didn’t trust me as much as I trusted him.

He’d once listed me as most trusted even over my own parents in those invitations he’d sent out. I wanted to be that River to him.

I was grateful to put off, even for just a little longer, the time where he didn’t trust me. Like before 1969.

And then the time crack really showed up with a vengeance.

“What's that?” I asked, ever helpful, ever prodding.

“Readings from a crack in a wall.”

“How can a crack in the wall be the end of the universe?”

I love asking him questions I already know the answer to.

“Here's what I think. One day there'll be a very big bang, so big every moment in history - past and future - will crack.”

“Is that possible? How?”

“How can you be engaged in a manner of speaking?”

Was he jealous? A little bit perhaps. Doesn’t really want me but doesn’t want me to want anyone else. That’s the Doctor sometimes.

“Well...sucker for a man in uniform.”

Then Octavian would ruin it all.

“Dr Song is in my personal custody. I released her from the Stormcage Containment Facility four days ago and I am legally responsible for her until she has accomplished her mission and earned her pardon. Just so we understand each other.”

“You were in Stormcage?”

The device beeped. Evasion time.

“What? What is that?”

“The date! The date of the explosion where the crack begins.”

Not that I didn’t already know that, of course.

“And for those of us who can't read the base code of the universe?”

“Amy's time!”

Or my parents’ wedding day, or the day both of us were nearly erased from time, or, if you want to get really personal, my conception.

It was really very funny watching him work it all out when I’d lived it already. But such is the nature of our relationship, one of us is always really confused and the other one insufferable with foreknowledge.

We got to the flight deck and I made myself acquainted with the controls. My first thought was to get the teleport working because there were now two dangers in those woods.

That’s what I was working on when the Doctor blundered in sans my keeper.

“There's a teleport! If I can get it to work, we can beam the others here. Where's Octavian?”

“Octavian's dead, so is that teleport. You're wasting your time. I'm going to need your communicator.”

Well, there went my high hopes for my parole. And a good man for all my poking fun at him.

Also Amy was alone in the forest, lost and confused. I kept working on the teleport. The Doctor is brilliant, but so am I. I worked and I listened to their conversation.

“Amy, I'm sorry. I should never have left you there.”

“Well, what do I do now?”

“You come to us. Primary flight deck, other end of the forest.”

“I can't see! I can't open my eyes.”

“When the communicator sounds like my screwdriver, you're facing the right way. Follow the sound. You have to start moving now. There's time energy spilling out of that crack and you have to stay ahead of it.”

“But the Angels, they're everywhere.”

“I'm sorry, I really am, but the Angels can only kill you.”

“What does the time energy do?”

“Just keep moving!”

“Tell me!”

“If the time energy catches up with you, you'll never have been born. It will erase every moment of your existence. You will never have lived at all. Now, keep your eyes shut and keep moving!”

“It's never going to work,” I said grimly, continuing my work.

“What else have you got? River, tell me!” he shouted at me.

I flinched, but I didn’t say anything. This Doctor didn’t know me, this Doctor was sick with worry and frightened. I was frightened. I could not take this personally. I had to keep working.

“That time energy, what's it going to do?” I asked, because I didn’t quite know how we could close this crack so he could go and live and close all of them.

“Er, keep eating.”

“How do we stop it?”

“Feed it.”

“Feed it what?”

“A big complicated space/time event should shut it up for a while.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Like me, for instance!” he yelled again.

Oh, I was going to give my Doctor a good talking to the next time I met him. Don’t get me wrong, I love any Doctor, but this one was so angry. He must have been really scared and that scared me. And nobody likes being yelled at for no reason. I was used to him yelling, but this was different.

I shut away the thought that I might never get to see my Doctor again.

So I fixed the teleport and got Amy back on my own.

“I teleported you,” I told her and then turned to him. “See? Told you I could get it working.”

“River Song, I could bloody kiss you.”

Hot and cold, my man.

“Ah well, maybe when you're older.”

And less prone to violent outbursts.

Well, that’s never going to happen.

And then the Angels were there and Angel Bob made his grand appearance.

“There is a rupture in time. The Angels calculate that if you throw yourself into it, it will close and they will be saved.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could do, could do that. But why?”

“Your friends would also be saved.”

“Well, there is that.”

And then I got my idea. It would work just as well. He didn’t know how well.

“I've travelled in time. I'm a complicated space/time event too. Throw me in.”

“Oh, be serious! Compared to me, these Angels are more complicated than you and it would take every one of them to amount to me, so get a grip.”

That’s what he thinks. But all of that knowledge for him is still to come. Yes, he is more complex, but if he threw a few Angels in with me it would work out.

“Doctor, I can't let you do this.”

“No, seriously, get a grip.”

“You're not going to die here!”

“No, I mean it. River, Amy, get a grip.”

“Oh, you genius!”

I absolutely love those moments of realization that he would save everything.

The Angels flew and we held on and before I knew it, we were climbing out of the wreckage and the troops on the beach had arrested me the moment they found out Octavian was dead.

After making sure Amy was okay, the Doctor walked to where I was waiting.

“You, me...handcuffs. Must it always end this way?” I teased him. 

“What now?”

“The prison ship's in orbit. They'll beam me up any second. I might have done enough to earn a pardon this time. We'll see.”

“Octavian said you killed a man.”

That gave me pause. The moment had come. The sad moment where he had to put me on his possible baddy list.

“Yes, I did. A good man. A very good man. The best man I've ever known.”

“Who?”

“It's a long story, Doctor, can't be told. It has to be lived. No sneak previews. Well, except for this one: you'll see me again quite soon, when the Pandorica opens.”

I couldn’t resist. After all, I knew that’s what he had to be dealing with since he had Amy with him and judging from what we’d just gone through.

“The Pandorica, ha! That's a fairy tale,” he whispered in my ear.

I smiled over at him.

“Oh, Doctor, aren't we all? I'll see you there.”

“I look forward to it.”

And I think he actually did. Fits of temper and manslaughter aside, I think he was intrigued enough to look forward to the River Song bits of his life.

“I remember it well.”

“Can I trust you, River Song?”

“If you like, but where's the fun in that?”

Safely ensconced back at Stormcage, I met with the review board. A little known fact about cleric missions is that everything is streamed through to their base of operations. It doesn’t matter who or where you are, they know what’s going on. Keeps the men honest and gives a clear picture of the mission. Like a little Home Box of their own.

Despite Octavian’s last warning about me to the Doctor everything else I’d done on the mission, including volunteering to sacrifice myself to save the very man I’d killed, (though one man was vehement that it was because I had to save him until I actually killed him to preserve time lines or something like that. Poor dear didn’t really know anything about me). I was reduced down to ten years in prison.

Well, I could live with that. But it’s their own fault for not making no more escaping as part of the agreement. I was gripped with a real need to see my parents and know that they knew me. I set another nicked vortex manipulator, (really, those things break like nobody’s business), to a time where I’d be certain they did know me.

“Heard there was a freak meteor shower two miles away so I got us a bottle.”

My mother was getting better with age.

“Thank you, dear.”

“So where are we?”

“I just climbed out of the Byzantium. You were there. So young, didn't have a clue who I was. You're funny like that. Where are you?”

“The Doctor's dead.”

And then I immediately wanted to mother my mother. Life is not wonderful when the Doctor’s dead for you.

“How are you doing?”

“How do you think?”

“Well, I don't know unless you tell me.”

“Do you know he dropped us down right after he died?” Amy said dully. “Yes, I know he’d already died for us, but as long as we were traveling with him it was still two hundred years off. Now it’s only been a few weeks for the rest of the world since the three of us were on that beach watching him…die.”

“Time travel isn’t easy, Amy,” I told her. “No one knows that better than I do. But this makes the most sense for your lives, doesn’t it? You can pick up where you left off, no huge disappearances to explain to anybody.”

“Just a whopping house and really expensive car as my husband informs me.”

“Modeling is very good to you,” I told her.

She looked askance at me.

“Who told you I was going to do that?”

“Spoilers,” I said, smiling. “Besides, that will help. Really, Amy dear, he was trying to give you a gift. I doubt it even occurred to him about the date.”

“Lots of things don’t occur to that idiot,” Amy said without malice.

“Truer words…” I trailed off and studied her face. “There’s something else bothering you. Ah…it’s only just happened for you. His death. Not on the beach, but in the timeline I created.”

“I killed someone. Madame Kovarian, in cold blood.”

Was it wrong for me to feel…warm about that? Partially out of the knowledge that she must have done that for me and partially out of hating that woman. I’ll have to set aside time to work out my psychopathic tendencies later.

“In an aborted time-line, in a world that never was...”

“Yeah, well, I can remember it, so it happened, so I did it. What does that make me now? I need to talk to the Doctor, but I can't now, can I?”

I set down my glass with a calculated air.

“If you could talk to him, would it make a difference?”

“But he's dead, so I can't.”

“Oh, Mother...of course he isn't.”

I leaned forward as she denied everything I said. Too much hope for her to bear, I imagine. I know it would have been for me. But she had to learn that the Doctor lies and so do I. It’s the way of our world.

“Oh, that man, he's always one step ahead of everyone. Always a plan.”

“River, what did he tell you? River!”

I laughed and told her everything. It was rather refreshing not to lie. And out of all the people in the universe, my parents deserved to know the truth. The truth that I’d held for so many years already.

Rory came home just then and Amy hugged him wildly as she told him the news.

“He's not dead, he's not dead!”

“Are you sure, River? Are you really, properly sure?”

“Of course I'm sure. I'm his wife!”

“Yes! And I'm his...mother-in-law.”

“Father dear, I think Mummy might need another drink.”

And we did drink. All three of us. Rory was too hung over to go into hospital next day and I spent a few days with them, helping Amy get her contacts going, laughing at her choice of name for her perfume, going shopping, and listening to Rory lecture about how I should behave my last few years in prison.

It was wonderful.

***

It was rather amazing how fast ten years flew by. I barely realized it. And it was a bit odd to think of not ever going back to Stormcage. Prison or not it had been a sort of home for a very long time. About six weeks before my release I woke up in the middle of the night to the welcome sound of the Tardis wheezing herself into existence in front of my cell.

“Oh bother,” the Doctor said, stepping out and realizing he was on the wrong side of the bars.

He got out the sonic and broke me out five seconds slower than he would have had he gotten the right side.

“Hello, sweetie,” I said, patting him on the head. “Come to wish me luck?”

“This is a celebration visit,” he said. “You’re finally going to not be in prison for that thing you didn’t do.”

“Yes, funny how that works,” I said, entering the Tardis. “So…where are we going?”

“What’s a celebration without a party?” he said, pointing toward the interior of the Tardis. “Get yourself a fancy dress, Dr. Song,”

“I’m thinking about going back to school,” I told him.

“What made you think that?”

“A certain misspoke word on a beach.”

“You’ve spoilered me lots of times,” he said defiantly. “It was only the second time I’d ever met you.”

“No wonder you were cross, poor thing,” I said and went to get changed.

The Tardis, among other things, is the best shopping complex in the world. And it’s free.

The Doctor was wearing his black suit, bowtie and all, and we made rather a fine couple if I did say so myself.

“We make rather a fine couple.”

You see?

“You don’t want me to kiss your hand or anything?” he asked, looking worried.

“Don’t worry, my love,” I said. “I wouldn’t presume to pull privileges with you.”

“Because you have them to pull and simply won’t or you simply don’t have them?”

“We’d better do diaries,” I said, pulling mine out of my handbag.

He’d only just found out about that aborted timeline. But he was still traveling with my parents or had picked them up again. He was a bit unclear. They were, apparently, asleep.

When we arrived I opened my mouth for a second or two.

“When you said party, sweetie, you really meant it.”

He got smug for a minute or two as he is so apt to do.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said, “or, rather, don’t, cause it’s impossible, but I’m very good, aren’t I?”

“I’ve never quite made up my mind about it,” I told him and flounced past into the ballroom.

The Inaugural Ball was a very big deal. I had loads of fun dancing and flirting and making contacts. Of course, then the Doctor had to come up behind me and tell me that two very important people/aliens had been turned into a fly and a goldfish. He thrust a goldfish bowl at me while he went to imprison the fly in the Tardis. I don’t think he quite remembered exactly how big the Tardis actually is.

Then he came back and snatched the goldfish whispering about how I had to keep the Ambassador from killing everyone in the room and could only do so whilst the goldfish was kept safe and the Warrior Chief fly was imprisoned which he would do himself, thank you very much.

I rolled my eyes, but did as he instructed. When I had to strong arm a delegate to their knees to keep them from attacking I realized the Doctor may have had a point.

Until he stuck his head out the door and exclaimed that we’d got the wrong fish. Oh, that blasted man.

A lovely lady named Marlee took hold of the Ambassador who somehow had the phone number to the Tardis and the Doctor and I were off to the pet shops.

One purchase with psychic paper later, (neither of us carry money), and we were golden. It did involve the Doctor inspecting every goldfish in the shop and talking to them.

One five hour truce talk later with the Prince of Wales and the Ambassador from Trii’l who had to commit a ritual slaughter of ten billion souls or his planet would explode, and I was exhausted and had had quite enough celebrating. The Doctor took me home while I changed out of my dress. After I’d done that I discovered that he’d gotten a cricket bat from somewhere.

Sighing, I gave him a quick peck and waved goodbye.

“Don’t tell your parents!” he called after me.

I got out of Stormcage on my birthday. The Doctor was waiting for me. 

“Well, wife, where to?” he asked.

“You must be chipper today,” I said, slightly surprised. “I don’t often get such a title.”

“Well, it’s more binding than the one with Marilyn, I have to admit,” he said. 

“I’ll be sure and mention it the next time I see her,” I said.

“Just tell me where you want to go, River,” the Doctor said. “The universe awaits. You could even…stay…now…if you wanted.”

My heart leapt up into my throat. An invitation to stay with the Doctor, to run with him forever, was not something offered every day.

“Raincheck?” I asked, looking him in the eye.

“Reason?” he countered. “Cause you don’t fool me. I know how much you want to come. Like anyone else would. Like you have before.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you make about as much sense as a kangaroo on the Coast of Verigo on Hedi’r?”

“I understood him perfectly, I don’t know what you’re on about.”

I rolled my eyes.

“I can’t come with you, my love. I’ve been…not exactly cooped up for so many years, but not exactly free either. And I need a little time to spread my wings. You still have enemies out there. You still want to keep a lower profile. Quite the screamer here. Ring any bells?”

“Those Judoon won’t ever forget that night,” he said, grimacing. “And my ears are permanently damaged, I tell you. I’ve resorted to using a horn sometimes.”

“Liar,” I said affectionately. “Just drop me off back at school, sweetie. I’ve a yen to learn some more.”

“Any particular year?”

“How about right after I graduated and I’ll drive?”

“Spoilsport,” he grumbled.

“Spoiler-sport,” I said, grinning and flipped the switch.

It was surprisingly easy to get back into the swing of school. Naturally some people, including some of the instructors, were suspicious of me. It wasn’t as much fun as before, not that I'd had such a blast the first time. River Song was notorious in that time period even if I’d never technically committed the crime I never committed in the first place. But I was there to study and study I did.

I met the Doctor twice before I got my second degree. The first time was something I can’t explain. Something I don’t understand. Something I can’t even bear to think about. Suffice it to say that I came away from the encounter with the knowledge of the Doctor’s name. His actual, true, proper name. A name to rend the heavens. He’d given it to me with a sad smile on his face; as if he thought it meant something other than…I can’t think about that.

But the second time was very soon after the Byzantium for him and I cut it short. It was another reminder to me that he wouldn’t always know me. And that broke my heart again.

After I graduated again I got a job on a dig on the world of the Kfeavers. That was an adventure and a half and people started to look at me differently, with more respect and more fear. If such a thing were possible. 

One day I got a call about a prospective job with a Mr. Lux. I haphazardly mentioned it to the Doctor the next time I saw him. His timestream seemed to be right after he found out who I was. I had my back to him, but I could somehow sense that the news was startling and revealing to him. He started babbling twice as fast as normal and a cold feeling drifted down my spine.

I spent a couple of weeks in the Tardis at that point and he spent a great deal of it fiddling with his screwdriver. It looked different than the one that I’d always seen him with before. But…a man’s allowed to change his screwdriver. 

He dropped me off at my meeting with a rather hurried air as if he was anxious to get it over with. No kisses from that Doctor.

My meeting was quite successful and I was due the next day to meet the team of people I would be leading. But when I got home that night I found the Doctor on my doorstep.

“Where’s the one place I’ve always promised to take you?” the Doctor said with a small smile.

“The Singing Towers?” I asked, bouncing a little. “Is it finally time?”

“That’s right. Now get in there and get dressed.”

He finally got me into that dress, (he doesn’t know about the time I nicked it when we were in America, Rory was the one who pulled me out of the pool), and we were off.

“One quick stop,” he said, pulling levers and typing something on the typewriter. “A little business meeting. You don’t mind waiting outside.”

“Too important for the likes of me?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, that’s it,” he said, pushing me out the Tardis door and we were on Calderon Bita again.

“Is this your new Earth?” I asked.

He pointed me toward the elevator.

“Just go…go…go do things. Things you will do.”

“All right, no need to shove,” I said.

I wandered around for a moment or two and then I spotted the Tardis up ahead. And I couldn’t resist. After all, he was obviously playing something with me tonight. Two can play games.

"You nostalgic idiot. You just can't keep away, can you?"

I went out to check the bulb when he asked me to. I know, you don’t have to say it, what a ridiculous thing to do.

When I went back in I’d barely gotten to say so when I heard another voice behind me.

"No, River! Wrong Tardis, I'm parked around back,” he said and slowed down, grinning at the white-suited Doctor at the console. “Younger version."

"Two of you. The mind races, does it not?" I said, not really having had a chance at my birthday party years ago.

"Come on, or we'll be late," my Doctor told me.

"He's taking me to the Singing Towers of Derillium. He's been promising for ages."

I walked away, really looking forward to it. The Doctor had been promising. Every time I’d mentioned it, he’d gotten a sad look in his eyes and changed the subject or blown something up. Which made me suspicious about why he was doing it now, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

My Doctor stayed a moment or two in the younger Doctor’s Tardis. I don’t know what they talked about, but it was a rather subdued Doctor that rejoined me.

“Finish the meeting, my love?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

“What meeting? No meeting. Let’s go,” he said and grabbed my hand, yanking me along.

“Rule One,” I muttered.

We did make it to the Singing Towers. I don’t know if I could say it was my favorite of everything he’d ever showed me. I’ve seen so many wonders. It was beautiful though and emotional. The music was unlike anything I’d ever heard before including when the Doctor had opened my mind to be able to hear the Song of the Ood the time that I learned about the DoctorDonna and his loss of her. It took my breath away as we sat together, my head on his shoulder.

When I looked at him again I was surprised to see tears on his cheeks.

“You’re rather human tonight, Doctor,” I said lightly, not wanting to dig too deep.

“Happens every couple of hundred years,” he said, but his face was so sad. So sad.

“What’s wrong, my love?” I asked, putting my hands on his shoulders.

“Nothing you can fix, most amazing of wives,” he told me, and for the first time ever, initiated a kiss with me.

Which was just as amazing as our first two, though tinged with the salt of his tears.

“Thank you,” I told him.

“I have something for you,” he said and fiddled in his pockets, bringing out a myriad of things before getting the screwdriver that I’d seen him fiddling with.

“For me?” I asked. “Aren’t you worried what I’ll do with it?”

“It’s what I’ll do with it,” he said softly. 

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. “Treasure it well and promise me you won’t go anywhere without it. Please.”

It was the please that made me pause. Almost desperate.

“I promise,” I said quietly.

I leaned in and kissed him again and he wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly for the rest of the night while the towers filled the night air with soaring melodies and whirling harmonies.


	4. Part Four

I didn’t really have time to dwell on the Doctor’s odder than usual behavior. I spent the next couple of weeks getting to know my new crew. Lux was an absolute idiot, seemingly hell bent on protecting his family’s pride more than anything else. I mostly ignored him and when he tried to get me to sign his stupid contract I got out the hallucinogenic lipstick.

His assistant, Miss Evangelista, was a bit of a sweetheart though brain dead to a very sad extent and my patience did get sorely tried with all the time we spent looking after her instead of doing our jobs.

Proper Dave was the first one I met after that. Of course we just called him Dave at that point. He was stubborn and solid and rather ingenious.

And there was Anita who had a sly sense of humor with the milk of human kindness running in every vein. My kind of girl.

Other Dave joined us after a bit and he was slightly awkward and tended to ramble, but he was brave and very good with his hands.

All in all, it was a merry band of six that set off for the Library.

I hadn’t known very much about what the mission was when I’d told the Doctor about it but it intrigued me very much. A whole planet put in lockdown for a hundred years and only just unsealed for an expedition led by yours truly. Four thousand and twenty two people gone. Irresistible and I thought the Doctor would be of the same mind. On almost a whim I sent him a message via the psychic paper. I admit I was in a bit of a hurry when I sent it.

But he obviously got it because I saw that old Tardis blue on our way through the main circulation area. I backtracked and took the other way around to see if I could spot him.

And then I stepped through the door and there he was. The Doctor, his back to me, upper torso shrouded in shadow. But it couldn’t be anyone else.

I untinted my visor.

“Hello, sweetie.”

He swung around and my heart stopped.

“Get out. All of you, turn around, get back in your rocket and fly away! Tell your grandchildren you came to the Library and lived. They won't believe you.”

I spent about twelve seconds hyperventilating. It wasn’t the Doctor. Not my Doctor. He was the version right before mine. Glasses, spiky hair, brown coat, not my Doctor.

But…he’d come. Could it be that maybe time had gotten rewritten somehow? Could maybe he have met me earlier than he’d known at the time?

“Pop your helmets, everyone. We got breathers.”

Nothing to do but be myself until I found out and jabber on about dating androids and how I’m a pathological liar when Lux started whining about the need for exclusivity.

I couldn’t read this Doctor. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I just treated him like my Doctor. He was very urgent and upset and that scared me. Though it didn’t stop me from baiting him.

“Oh, you're not, are you? Tell me you're not archaeologists.”

“Got a problem with archaeologists?”

“I'm a time traveler. I point and laugh at archaeologists.”

“Ah. Professor River Song, archaeologist.”

My heart was sinking lower and lower and I could barely keep up my appearance of witty banter. Unless he was pulling some sort of ruse, he was too young.

How do you explain your feelings on the very day that all your worst nightmares come true? I went straight to denial until we did diaries.

Despite the obvious urgency of the situation and the bewilderment of my team and whoever the Doctor’s companion was, I had to know first.

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“The usual. For coming when I call.”

“That was you?”

Another jolt of despair.

“Okay, shall we do diaries, then? Where are we this time?” He stared at me blankly. “…Obviously ringing no bells. Huh, life with a time traveler - never knew it could be such hard work. Um...” and I couldn’t deny it any more. There wasn’t any point in interrogating him about things that I knew he’d never done just to get some sort of wish fulfillment. “Look at you,” I said instead, “you're young.”

“I'm really not, you know.”

“No, but you are.” I put my hand to his cheek, wondering at the difference. “Your eyes...you're younger than I've ever seen you.”

I was a little bit too distraught to worry about denying I knew him at this point.

“You've seen me before then?”

I closed my eyes against the pain and made one last ditch effort to somehow force his memory even as I silently said goodbye.

“Doctor...please tell me you know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

I welcomed the distraction at that point because I’d never been so hurt by words before.

It was only moments later when I saw him eyeing my diary and putting his hand on it.

It made me angry to be so close to the man I loved and so far away. To have to carry this burden. 

“Sorry,” I said coldly, “you're not allowed to see inside the book. It's against the rules.”

“What rules?”

“Your rules.”

And I walked away, getting myself under control, breathing deeply, remembering everything he’d taught me. I had to be smart, had to be enigmatic River Song, unknown to the Doctor, helping him be brilliant, preserving the timelines.

I believe I’ve talked quite a lot about the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. This was now number one after killing him.

But I gave him his help.

“There was one other thing in the last message.”

“That's confidential,” Lux spouted off.

“I trust this man with my life...with everything.”

“You've only just met him.”

“Nope. He's only just met me.”

And that was the way I had to play it. This personal crisis could not overcome the physical dangers presenting themselves to us. To the horror of an innocent girl stripped clean and consumed by an unknown entity and gasping out her last few conscious thoughts to people she’d never been able to please.

But the Doctor wouldn’t give up.

“What's in that book?”

“Spoilers.”

I rather enjoyed flinging his word at him as I can imagine he would later.

“Who are you?”

“Professor River Song, University of-“

“To me. Who are you to me?”

“Again...spoilers.”

I gave him some lunch and he proved that he might not be my Doctor, but he was definitely the Doctor.

He knew how to play by the rules even if he didn’t know why. Donna was another story altogether.

“You know him, don't you?”

“Oh, do I know that man. We go way back, that man and me...just not this far back.”

“I'm sorry, what?”

“He hasn't met me yet. I sent him a message but it went wrong. It arrived too early. This is the Doctor in the days before he knew me. And he looks at me...he looks right through me, and it shouldn't kill me, but it does.”

It was a bit odd to be explaining this to a complete stranger, but I needed to tell someone. Trust Donna to cut straight to the chase.

Then I found out she was Donna and there was another secret I had to keep. The story of Donna Noble, the most important woman in the universe. How much more could one woman carry?

Of course we lost Proper Dave and he sent Donna away and we had to do the running thing.

I used a gun I’d picked up from my Doctor’s Tardis and this one seemed to recognize it. But there was no more time for pleasantries. There was only running for our lives. A little exhilarating to be honest and a little nice to reach for his hand and have him grip it while we ran.

We had no light and I pulled out my screwdriver.

“So what's the plan? Do we have a plan?”

“Your screwdriver...looks exactly like mine.”

“Yeah. You gave it to me.”

“I don't give my screwdriver to anyone.”

“I'm not anyone.”

“Who are you?”

“What's the plan?” I said stubbornly.

And then again more urgently when it became apparent we couldn’t go forward and Proper Dave’s skeletal remains were coming up from behind and Donna Noble’s face was etched into a node beside us.

Because, in a crisis, no matter what version, you always ask the Doctor what to do.

We made it to a bit of a clear space and collapsed for a bit and it was clear that the stress was starting to show on my team. I felt a bit guilty. I’d been so focused on my own pain and loss that wasn’t related to the dangers we were in and hadn’t really thought about how this must seem to them.

“Who is he? You haven't even told us. You just expect us to trust him,” Other Dave said, out of breath.

“He's the Doctor,” and, really, that should have been enough.

Would have been for anyone who’d ever met him before.

“And who is ‘the Doctor?’ " Lux asked sarcastically.

“The only story you'll ever tell…if you survive him.”

One always has to put those little disclaimers on the end of sentences about the Doctor.

“You say he's your friend but he doesn't even know who you are.”

A very good point, Anita, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now.

“Listen, all you need to know is this: I'd trust that man to the end of the universe. And actually, we've been.”

A slight lie. He’d been and he wouldn’t take me, but the premise remained the same.

“He doesn't act like he trusts you,” Anita said, persisting.

“Yeah, there's a tiny problem - he hasn't met me yet.” I couldn’t talk about it anymore so I walked over to the Doctor who was apparently having trouble with his screwdriver. “What's wrong with it?”

“There's a signal coming from somewhere interfering with it.”

“Use the red settings.”

“It doesn't have a red setting.”

“Well, use the dampers.”

“It doesn't have dampers.”

“It will do one day,” I said and handed him mine.

“So, sometime in the future, I just give you my screwdriver?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I didn't pluck it from your cold, dead hands if that's what you're worried about.”

Though there had been times when I’d been tempted to. Like now.

“And I know that because...”

I tried to see it from his point of view, I really did.

“Listen to me. You've lost your friend, you're angry, I understand. But you need to be less emotional, Doctor, right now.”

“Less emo- I'm not emotional!”

“There are five people in this room still alive. Focus on that. Dear God, you're hard work young.”

I was so exasperated and frustrated and afraid.

“Young? Who are you?”

“For heaven's sake!” interrupted a voice. “Look at the pair of you! We're all gonna die right here, and you're just squabbling like an old married couple.”

To have Lux be the voice of reason was a rather low blow. I took a deep breath and made a decision.

“Doctor...one day I'm going to be someone you trust completely. But I can't wait for you to find that out. So I'm going to prove it to you. And I'm sorry. I'm really...very sorry.” And I whispered his name in his ear. That terrible, beautiful name. “Are we good?” He stared at me, non-plussed, almost afraid. “Doctor...are we good?”

“Yeah, yeah, we're good.”

“Good.”

Of course everything wasn’t all that good because Anita had two shadows and we were running from Proper Dave and the Doctor was being stupid and trying to reason with an unreasonable thing again. I really wished for my parents.

We found another spot that seemed relatively safe and stopped for a moment. It was all catching up to me again. It was somehow easier to talk to Anita now that I couldn’t see her face.

“You know...it's funny, I keep wishing the Doctor was here.”

“The Doctor is here, isn't he? I mean, he's coming back, right?”

“You know when you see a photograph of someone you know but it's from years before you met them, and it's like they're not quite...finished, they're-they're not quite done yet? Well...yes, the Doctor's here. He came when I called just like he always does. But not my Doctor. Now, my Doctor...I've seen whole armies turn and run away, and he'd just swagger off back to his Tardis and open the doors with a snap of his fingers. The Doctor...in the Tardis; next stop: everywhere.”

Just like the day I was born. And the day he found me. And the day he married me. So many days. Days that were over.

“Spoilers!” the present Doctor called from the other side of the room. “Nobody can open a Tardis by snapping their fingers. Doesn't work like that.”

“It does for the Doctor,” I said firmly, a little of the resentment coming back at being overheard.

“I am the Doctor.”

“Yeah, some day.”

That day couldn’t come soon enough for me. But it had come and it had gone and now I had to live with it.

Of course the Doctor figured it out. He figured out what had happened to those people and Lux finally decided our lives were worth more than his family pride.

I opened a way for us to get there and, voila, we had a plan.

“Gravity platform.”

“I bet I like you.”

“Oh, you do.”

Except there was a little girl with a whole world in her head and the planet was going to explode and the Doctor was trying to commit suicide.

“Easy. We beam all the people out of the data core, the computer will reset and stop the countdown. Difficult. Charlotte doesn't have enough memory space left to make the transfer. Easy! I'll hook myself up to the computer and she can borrow my memory space!”

It was rather refreshing watching him run around, talking to himself. Apart from the main point of him dying and all.

“Difficult. It'll kill you stone dead!”

“Yeah, it's easy to criticize.”

“It'll burn up both your hearts and don't think you'll regenerate!”

“I'll try my hardest not to die. Honestly, it's my main thing.”

“Doctor!”

“If I'm right, this'll work. Shut up! Now, listen, you and Luxy Boy, back up to the main library. Prime any data cells you can find for maximum download. And before you say anything else, Professor, can I just mention, as you're here, shut up.”

“Oh! I hate you sometimes!”

I’d never meant it more than when I was just starting to like this Doctor.

“I know!”

And I think he was starting to feel the same way.

“Mr Lux, with me. Anita, if he dies...I'll kill him!”

Once the red rage had cleared I could think. I could sort through all the pieces. I could understand the final irony.

This Doctor didn’t know me. He didn’t know I was the child of the Tardis and could see through all of his blustering.

This Doctor would die. And the Doctor couldn’t die this young. I would not allow it. I refused to sacrifice the pain and the joy that we’d been through. We’d been traveling backwards, my love and I, he from my death and me toward it.

No time like the present for death so I left Lux to do his job, just a little bit more disposed to like him.

And found Anita gone. Poor, brave Anita.

So I knocked the Doctor out and carried on with his work. I was beginning to think he wouldn’t wake up before I’d done it when I heard his anguished voice.

“Oh, no, no, no! What are you doing? That's my job.”

“What, I'm not allowed to have a career, I suppose?”

He’ll find that funny in a few years.

“Why am I handcu- why do you even have handcuffs?”

“Spoilers.”

“This is not a joke. Stop this now. This is going to kill you! I'll have a chance, you don't have any!”

My clever Doctor, you can’t fool me that way. This is the universe’s greatest joke at my expense. I might as well have a little fun with it.

“You wouldn't have a chance and neither do I!” I snapped at him. “I'm timing it for the end of the countdown. There'll be a blip in the command flow. That way it should improve our chances of a clean download.”

“River, please, no!”

Now that it was the end, I didn’t mind spoilering him so much. After all, he’d held the ultimate spoiler all along. And it turns out that I was the one to give it to him.

“Funny thing is, this means you've always known how I was going to die. All the time we've been together, you knew I was coming here. The last time I saw you - the real you, the future you, I mean - you turned up on my doorstep with a new haircut and a suit. You took me to Derillium to see the Singing Towers. Oh, what a night that was. The towers sang...and you cried.”

“Auto-destruct in one minute,” the computer reminded me.

“You wouldn't tell me why, but I suppose you knew it was time - my time, time to come to the Library. You even gave me your sonic screwdriver - that should have been a clue.”

“Let me do this!” he pleaded with me.

“If you die here, it'll mean I've never met you.”

“Time can be rewritten!”

No one knew that better than me. But if I wouldn’t rewrite time to be with my parents because of him, then there’s no way I’d do it to avoid a little death.

“Not those times. Not one line. Don't you dare.” I finally understood him on the shore of the lake now. The plagiarizing idiot. I love him so much. “It's okay. It's okay, it's not over for you. You'll see me again. You've got all of that to come. You and me…time and space. You watch us run.”

And I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t give him words of love for my parents. I couldn’t tell him I was his wife. This was the payoff for all my years of loving the Doctor.

“River, you know my name.”

The computer countdown started and he started talking about how I knew his name. I closed my eyes in memory of the pain and glory of that day.

“Hush, now. Spoilers.”

And I connected the cables.

The days and words whirled through my head, love and memories and Rory and Amy and the last time I’d seen them, and my thoughts, as always, were for the Doctor.

Because…

When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it will never end. But however hard you try, you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of the all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it.

Everybody knows that everybody dies.

But not every day.

Not that day.

Because I was no longer lanced through with light and pain and memories. I was floating and clean and free. On green grass with two people in front of me.

“It's okay. You're safe. You'll always be safe here. The Doctor fixed the data core. This is a good place now. But I was worried you might be lonely so I brought you some friends. Aren't I a clever girl?”

“Aren't we all?” came a voice from behind me and I turned around.

There were my friends. There was Proper Dave and Other Dave and Miss Evangelista and Anita, coming toward me over the grass.

And I laughed.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, he just can't do it, can he? That man, that impossible man. He just can't give in!”

I hugged them all and, other than Amy and Rory, there were no other people I’d rather spend eternity with.

I had no regrets. Saving the Doctor, saving my time with him, that was more important. He’d take care of my parents and they’d take care of him. Somehow I knew that straight after Derillium he’d gone to them. And he’d never give up. The universe needs its Doctor.

I was saved. Saved to live a sweet dream. I didn’t know if I was grateful to my Doctor, or my last Doctor, or all the Doctors. But, as always, my life started and ended with the Doctor.

Not to say that it ended. I tell the story over and over again. Anita knows all of my confidences now. I take care of three children who no longer have to wonder if they’re real. The story of the Doctor lives on in the universe and in my heart and in the forests of the Vashta Nerada and in a special blue book that never leaves my side.

Because…

Some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Some days, nobody dies at all. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair and the Doctor comes to call...everybody lives.


End file.
